US consulate halts new visa applications

The United States consulate in Shanghai said on Sunday that it will stop taking new visa applications due to technical problems with the US visa system.

Unspecified IT issues with the US visa system have caused problems for large numbers of applications around the world over the past five days.

An official with the US consulate told Shanghai Daily yesterday that it was not possible to state how many Shanghai applications have been delayed as staff were off duty at the weekend.

While new applications are halted, the consulate will continue interviewing applicants today. However, staff said they will clear the existing backlog first before processing these, local news portal thepaper.cn reported.

Among locals affected by the visa system problems, many are scheduled to travel by the end of August — often as students studying in US schools.

There has been a rapid growth in applications for US visas in Shanghai over the past few years.

In March, the consul expanded its capacity to process visa applications by 50 percent. It expected to be able to deal with 600,000 applications a year — more than 1,600 a day.

Tourists account for 80 percent of total applications, with students second on 15 percent, John M. Grondelski, visa unit chief of the US Consulate General in Shanghai, said on Friday.

In Shanghai, more than 95 percent of students are successful in their visa applications, said Grondelski.

The Shanghai office is the seventh largest US consular section in the world.

On Thursday, the US Bureau of Consular Affairs issued an notice stating that it was experiencing technical problems with its passport and visa system.

"We are operational, but currently issuing documents at a reduced capacity," said the notice.

It did not say when the problems began and how many people had been affected.

On Saturday, the bureau said the system problems had not yet been fixed.

The database holds some 100 million records of visa cases and 75 million photographs, and usually processes 35,000 visas a day, according to The Register, a British technology news website.

The system crashed following scheduled maintenance, said the website.