Link Card holders in Illinois were unable to use their food stamp debit cards after a glitch in the payment system caused a blockage at grocery stores around the Midwestern state on Saturday.
According to ABC Local, more than two million Illinois residents - about one in six - use a Link Card as part of the state's food stamp program.
One grocery store in Cicero was littered with full shopping carts left at the check out area, after customers who were unable to use food stamp debit cards like Link were turned away at the registers. At an Aldi grocery store in South Side Chicago, a sign in the window told customers that they couldn't purchase food there, leaving some users like Rob Lee with no choice but to skip his errands for the time being.
"Now I'm going to have to unfortunately do the fast food thing now," Lee told ABC. "No cooking tonight."
"That's how people starve," shopper Sean Wright told the local news station. "People starve if they don't have the Link to feed their children, to feed their family with."
By Saturday afternoon, the Illinois Department of Human Services website had crashed from the high volume of online traffic, as Link users scrambled to figure out what was going on.
"During a routing test of our back-up systems Saturday morning, Xerox's Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) system experienced a temporary shutdown," officials from Human Services wrote on their website.
The United State Department of Agriculture - the group that distributes food stamps and debit cards -maintained that the issue was not as a result of the federal government shutdown, but some were not convinced.
"I'm not surprised that they would say that this has nothing to do with the shutdown when everyone knows that it does," Durrell Featherstone, who uses a Link Card, said. "No one buys it."
"My first reaction was the federal government shutdown," cardholder Joe Mengoni, who organizes home stays for people with developmental disabilities, told ABC. "And I thought his has to be tied into that somehow. I would love for the state of Illinois to say, you know, 'We have enough in reserves to cover you through the end of the month, and if the shutdown continues, then we need to look at plan B."
