TRENTON — For the second Monday in a row, the MVC started the week with an offline computer system.

Service was restored around 1 p.m., according to a message on the agency's Twitter account. A spokeswoman did not know what caused the outage and referred questions to the Office of Information Technology. She also did not know how widespread the outage was throughout the state system.

In a statement,the OIT said a hardware failure on the computer system that supports the MVC's point-of-sale transactions and agency operations, as well as several other State agencies.

"The New Jersey Office of Information Technology activated incident response protocols within minutes; this involved on-site, off-site, and vendor activities which began Sunday afternoon and continued around the clock. At approximately 11:58 this morning, the service was restored. OIT is taking both immediate and long term steps toward the stabilization and modernization of Motor Vehicle’s computer systems," read the OIT's statement.

Earlier the MVC spokeswoman said that all systems were down at branch offices and on the MVC's website, and said it was a "residual effect in the data center" from last Monday's outage.

Last Monday's outage began with a "system error" over the weekend wit the MVC computers  not being brought online until mid afternoon.

The MVC computers are part of a nearly 40-year-old system that is near the end of its life.

“We still have upgrades that we need to do. I think there’s just been a lot to do and a sense of priority that we’re doing Real ID, and then we’ll worry about everything later,” MVC chief administrator Sue Fulton said at an Assembly budget hearing.

“But honestly that makes sense. We need to do REAL ID,” Fulton said. “We need to get that effectively done in terms of going back to our mission, right? Keeping New Jersey drivers safe and delivering customer service. We need to get that done.”

MVC customers took to Twitter to share their frustration.

Are you affected by the computer outage? Contact reporter Dan Alexander at Dan.Alexander@townsquaremedia.com or via Twitter @DanAlexanderNJ

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