Many U.S. citizens who already had passports were thrilled when the government, after several years of development and pilot programs, finally made online renewals a permanent feature. Besides being an easier process, the anecdotal reports of how quickly people got their passports back were VERY encouraging.
Anyway, after Donald Trump was sworn in and his people began various changes to government websites, there were reports of several government-related URLs being, well, broken. So the running joke-but-not-a-joke was if you were eligible to renew your passport online, to do it as soon as you could, just in case they “broke” the online passport renewal portal.
Concerns About Website Stability
Unfortunately, I think they broke the online passport renewal portal.
Over the weekend, I saw in a Facebook group that someone wanted the URL to renew their passport. I don’t know why they couldn’t just use a search engine to find the page (PASSPORT ONLINE RENEWAL would work), but I gave them a hand and went to the passport renewal site to get the URL so I could pass it on to them. And that’s when I saw this notification that the site couldn’t take payments:
It said:
Outage April 25, 2025
Pay.gov Partner Maintenance
Payment services are unavailable due to an outage and will be restored as quickly as possible.
Payment Problems on the Passport Renewal Site
The notification was dated April 25th, which was Friday. I saw this on Saturday. So I figured this “pay.gov partner maintenance” or “outage” (two very different things, mind you) could just be an issue over the weekend and would be back up at the start of the new week. But here it is, Monday April 28th, and the same notification is up there.
UPDATE – Sometime on the afternoon of Monday, April 28, they updated the notification to reflect that date, instead of Friday’s.
Whatever the date on the website, the online passport renewals can’t be done if people can’t make payments. It makes the site unusable.
What About Pay.gov Itself?
On a lark, I went to Pay.gov, since that’s the site where you make online payments for your online passport renewal. There was no option for passport payment on the home page, but if I searched for the key word PASSPORT, I only got the option to pay passport returned check fees, not to pay for a passport renewal fee.
That, needless to say, wasn’t very encouraging.
So…did the government break online passport renewals? Or is it truly just a maintenance issue? Will the site be usable again? Time will tell.
But for now, you miiiiight want to consider renewing by mail. Assuming that still works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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