Ahmedabad: Thousands of driving licence applicants across Gujarat faced major inconvenience on Monday after the RTO server went down at all 39 Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) in the state, including Ahmedabad, following the weekend holidays.

People who had planned to complete important work at RTO offices were forced to wait in long queues for hours, only to return disappointed as most services remained unavailable.

The server outage disrupted routine services such as driving licence renewals, issuance of duplicate licences and address changes. As a result, licence holders whose licences expired on Monday may now be required to undergo the process of obtaining a fresh licence, as per the existing rules.

It is learnt that the number of licences that expired across the state on Monday could exceed 5,000. Applicants and former transport department officials have urged the government to provide relief in such cases, arguing that citizens should not be made to suffer because of technical failures in the RTO or transport department systems.

Although the server was partially restored after noon, its performance remained extremely slow. Officials said that uploading even a single document was taking nearly an hour, severely affecting the processing of applications. DeshGujarat