BATON ROUGE - The Louisiana Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits system was down most of Sunday, but was functional at 5:45 p.m., DCFS said. 

The department released the following statement about the outage:

"DCFS has confirmed that a communication outage involving our national carrier Sunday (7/17/22) caused EBT transactions at Louisiana SNAP retailers to be denied. We regret any inconvenience this issue has caused our EBT card holders and we anticipate the issue to be resolved later today.

EBT recipients can call the LifeInCheck EBT Call Center (1-888-997-1117) or use the LifeInCheck EBT smart phone app for their balance or to report their card lost, stolen or damaged. Card holders should ask retailers if the merchant will support a manual voucher for SNAP purchases until electronic purchases are restored.  Some retailers have this capability."