Drivers were unable to renew their vehicle insurance Monday after the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia suffered an outage to its computer systems.
ICBC said all its systems were restored Monday night, though the insurance corporation said it was still watching things closely.
“ICBC experienced an outage [Monday] that started to slow systems at about 10 a.m. The issue was resolved at about 8:30 p.m. During this period, some customer transactions were able to proceed,” said spokeswoman Joanna Linsangan. “One of our back-end systems was experiencing a capacity issue that affected other systems tied to it.
“The outage affected some of our internal divisions and brokers who were unable to process all transactions. It also affected our ability to handle some claims, to a lesser degree.”
Linsangan said the corporation had a “work around” to deal with the system failure. “We had temporary operating permits. It’s not the best solution, but at least it was a solution to get people back on the road,” she said. The temporary operating permit is a three-day insurance policy which costs about $15, the average price of daily insurance for customers.
“When the customer returns, their full insurance policy will start on that day so they won't be out-of-pocket for any additional cost,” said Linsangan. “We understand this is still inconvenient for customers, the [temporary operating permit] option at least allows them to get insurance.”
