(Image source from: U.S. back in Visa Business after Major Outage})

U.S. Department of State is back in the business of issuing visas after the online system abruptly stopped working at consulates worldwide earlier this month.

About two thirds of visa issuance facilities are back online and have been issued visas although only 45,000 were handed out on Monday. Of those, 15,000 were issued in Beijing, which is the busiest U.S. consulate in the world.

"Significant additional numbers will be issued as the backlog clears," State Department Spokesman John Kirby said. "Many posts have now rescheduled interviews, in many cases as early as the 24th", he added.

"Significant additional numbers will be issued as the backlog clears," he said. "Many posts have now rescheduled interviews, in many cases as early as the 24th", he quipped. "So far, it's going well," Kirby ended.

The State Department hasn't provided details on what went wrong and why it took so long to fix, beyond saying the database needed to be rebuilt. The department said the failure was related to a hardware device and was not the result of a cyber attack.

The same database failed at about the same time last year, throwing summer travel plans in chaos for around 200,000 people.

On that occasion, a bug-ridden software patch from Oracle and Microsoft caused the problem.

Kirby cautioned that the system was still being tested and as such could still be taken offline again.

Throughout the outage, which also affected issuance of U.S. passports at missions overseas, the U.S. has been handled a small number of visa cases. It has issued around 1,250 visas to temporary or seasonal workers from Mexico whose biometric details were already in the system and it has handed out around 3,000 visas related to urgent or humanitarian purposes.

The system failure was second of its kind in the recent times. It throws the summer plans of almost 2, 00,000 passengers in chaos, when it failed last summer.

- Manohar. M