Food stamp system to go down across New York this weekend

New York's food stamp system will be shut down this weekend for installation of a new company computer program.

So stock up soon and avoid any misunderstandings they say.

But it's only "scheduled" to be down for about 12 hours from midnight Sunday until Noon.

One alarming part of the story is New York City has about 1/3 of its residents using food stamps !!

Is that accurate?

Shop now if you depend on food stamps or cash assistance from New York.

Neither will work starting early Sunday morning. The system will go down at midnight and isn't expected to come back online until noon Sunday.

It's being shut down so the state can switch to a new company to run the program. It will take at least 12 hours to do the switch. Medicaid benefits are on the same card, but they will not be affected by the change.

Nearly a third of the city's residents rely on food stamps, according to U.S. Census data.

Food stamp system to go down across New York this weekend

People Might *React* ...

if they don't know about

the "Scheduled" Downtime !!

We've already seen the reaction at least once when the system went down. I don't imagine everyone will get the memo... but I don't think it will be nearly as bad as the unexpected outage last time...

... Unless it takes longer than expected.

No worries. It's not the first of the month and most likely people have already stocked up until their cards are refilled.

No worries...they will all be too busy getting the new iPhone to notice....

First of all, it's Bush's fault.

Second of all, when will the riots begin?

They should shut it down from like 6 am to 6 pm when all them good people are sleeping. And yeah, tweet about it so all the good welfare recipients can learn about it on their latest smart phones.

Of course somebody is going to be on the news claiming their 8 children didnt get no breakfast...

Scheduled riots?! Less likely at this time of the month but never know might be part of a test. Be more alarmed if one of these upgrades happen around the first.

Furthermore a concern to add to the OP: One/third of the country are on benefits.

I would say its more like half of NYC is on food stamps. So what people hustled an I phone, rent in a project like apartment that resembles Good Times is 3200 a month, and I'm being generous.

NYC wouldn't feel this unless the internet went down, and the transit, and it lasted a week. Then if that happened, it would make son of sam look like a vacation.