The United States has been unable to issue visas to travelers around the world for two weeks because of a computer hardware failure that remains unresolved, State Department officials said Monday.

The country gets an average of 50,000 visa applications worldwide every day. The vast majority of those applications are piling up while the department tries to fix a hardware issue linked to biometric data. The failure prevented officials from processing and transmitting fingerprints and photographs for security checks.

“We are working around the clock to fix it,” John Kirby, a department spokesman, said Monday. “More than 100 computer experts from both the private and public sectors across the United States are working on this.”

The system was not expected to come back online before next week, Mr. Kirby said. In the meantime, the department issued 1,500 visas deemed priority cases for medical or humanitarian reasons. The department also issued 1,250 visas for temporary farm workers from Mexico whose biometric data had been captured before the system crashed.