LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — We have gotten so many questions from you about what services have been affected by the ongoing statewide outage, especially about the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).
WATCH | Getting to the bottom of your smog check questions after the statewide network outage
The latest comes from Helene in Centennial Hills, who sent an email to our newsroom about emissions testing:
"I went to four different smog businesses for a smog test, and all of them were not able to do one as their connection to the DMV was down. I'm getting a little nervous now as my registration is coming due — I'm a senior on fixed income, and driving all over town for a smog test is costly. Would you be so kind as to investigate this issue?"
I took Helene's question straight to the DMV, and got an email back from DMV spokesperson Hailey Foster:
"We did open up emission tests last week on Friday… I just confirmed with my team that emission tests are still being conducted and everything is running smoothly."
I also wanted to check in with local smog businesses to see if they're still having any issues, and how the last two weeks have been for them during the statewide outage.
"Well, it's been a nightmare," said Liddor Bega, a technician at a Jiffy Smog location at Durango and Centennial Parkway. "At first we couldn't smog any cars at all. The servers were completely wiped out, so we had a lot of clients complain. We lost a lot of business because of that."
Bega told me the problem lasted about a day, before they were able to connect back with the DMV's servers. Since then, he says it's been mostly smooth sailing.
In fact, a driver pulled up while we were chatting Thursday afternoon, and Bega got right to work.
From what I saw, everything worked as it should, and the emissions test was processed with no delays or hiccups in about five minutes.
Where they are still having some issues, Bega says, is with registration renewals.
"The problem is the renewals are a little bit glitchy, so sometimes it'll say 'unable to verify insurance' which isn't true — people have insurance, it's just that sometimes the DMV is not incorporating the two together," Bega said.
I also checked in with a few other smog businesses in the northwest valley who told me they were mostly back to normal as well, but a couple were seeing the registration glitch too.
In total, I saw about a dozen cars get a smog check Thursday afternoon across a handful of different locations, and they were all in and out in a matter of minutes.
Back at Jiffy Smog, Bega told me that even though their services are back online, their business is still feeling it.
"It's been a lot slower," Bega said. "I work at some other shops that do 70 to 90 cars a day, but when I've gone to work this week I've only done like 20 or 30 cars — the numbers have dropped by over 50%, it's wild."
So if you need a smog check, it seems like everything's back up and running for the most part, but it's always a good idea to have some extra patience for your smog tech while we all navigate the challenges of this statewide outage together.