Officials could not say how many people were affected by the outage. However, officials with the Secretary of State’s Office said they saw a spike that same weekend in requests for printed paper registration applications.

“It’s obviously pretty awful timing,” said Bert Brantley, the commissioner of the Driver Services Department. Brantley said technology vendors do the updates regularly, and in this case the vendor was trying to renew the security certificate ahead of a Nov. 2 expiration. The vendor did not expect a problem, Brantley said, and did not tell the department what it was doing. And no one knew it had failed until the Secretary of State’s Office noticed the glitch Monday, he said.