UPDATE: EBT Service Restored

By Cherri Gregg

PHILADELPHIA (CBS/AP) --Xerox announced late in the evening that access had been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported.

A system failure at a Xerox facility caused food stamp debit card problems in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and 14 other states earlier Saturday.

"It just kept coming up...'not connecting to host,'" says Rose Pizzo, the owner of Donna's Convenience Store at 8th and Oregon.
The family owned shop accepts food stamp debit cards, but on Saturday, the system was shutdown, and they had to turn away several customers.

"You feel bad for the people. They need the food. I feel more bad for them than I feel for us," Pizzo says.

Authorities say the glitch in the system caused shoppers from Maine to Oklahoma to abandon baskets of groceries.

"I personally just went on and paid for it," says Lorraine Grant of Germantown. She says her 87-year-old mother would have been turned away.

"I couldn't understand it, why all of a sudden there was a glitch on food stamps. It was puzzling," Grant adds.

Xerox spokesperson Karen Arena says they are working to address the problem.

"We do appreciate their patience because we know how important it is for them to be able to access benefits," adding that Xerox apologizes for the inconvenience.

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