WASHINGTON — AUG 21, 2009 — The federal cash for clunkers Web site for dealers crashed for part of the afternoon because of the government’s efforts to increase online capacity during the final days of the program, a Transportation Department spokeswoman said.
At 8:00 PM ET, the website was restored for most dealers. However, some dealers have been reporting sporadic outages.
“The problem has been fixed, and the system is operating,” said Jill Zuckman, a spokeswoman for Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
The outage was “related to the substantial increase in capacity that the department is bringing online to review transactions and process payments to dealers,” she said in an e-mail Friday evening.
“We’ve gotten numerous calls from dealers around the country,” NADA spokesman Charles Cyrill said.
The Transportation Department yesterday set an 8 p.m. EDT Monday filing deadline for dealers to submit claims, as the unexpectedly popular $3 billion program is becoming depleted of funds after just four weeks.
