“Antlerless deer licenses now may be purchased anywhere hunting liceses are sold, including online,” according to the update in the Game Commission’s Hunting and Trapping Digest. “Sales began alongside 2023-2024 general license sales on Monday, June 26, at 8 a.m.”

The huntfishpa.gov website was unable to handle the volume of visits it received and local licensing agents were not able to access the system for hours Monday morning.

“Due to the high volume of sales this morning, Pennsylvania’s hunting license system experienced widespread slowness and intermittent errors, both online and in-stores,” according a Monday release from the Game Commission. “The Pennsylvania Game Commission apologizes for the issues this has caused for our hunters. We are diligently working with our online vendor to identify and resolve issues to continue license sales.”

Warren County Treasurer Denny Munksgard said he’d heard that upwards of 100,000 customers were online trying to get licenses throughout the morning.

Times Observer photo by Brian Ferry Hunters wait in line Monday morning outside the Warren County Treasurer’s Office as the website that handles hunting licensing is unavailable. Some reportedly stood in line for more than two hours.

At the Warren County Treasurer’s office, the system worked for a while, then it stopped completely. “It crashed around 9:06 a.m.,” Munksgard said. “It was down for over two hours.”

The system came back up at 11:15 a.m. and the office started working through the line of customers in the courthouse hallway.

Once the system was up, customers moved through fairly quickly. Each customer took about 10 minutes, and the office had three people handling licenses.

For much of the morning, there was a line of patient, but disappointed customers in the hallway. Some waited more than two hours.

“They knew they were going to do this,” one customer said. “They should have upgraded the whole system.”

One customer who had been to three other licensing agents before the courthouse was pleased that there was some movement. “It’s working (here),” she said. “The other places aren’t working at all.”

“It’s taken so long,” another said. “At least with the pink envelopes we knew what was happening.”

Another said the process had stepped back 60 years with the changes.

The system was deluged with customers.

One of those in line at the courthouse said he logged in from home at 8:15 a.m. The system informed him he was customer number 54,010. As of 8:42 a.m., there were 48,010 customers in virtual line ahead of him.

William Foreman of Warren said he watched as some 15 other customers ahead of him in line gave up and left.

In addition to having to wait through the crash, Foreman was having trouble with a request for a senior license.

“I’m calling as soon as I get home,” he said. While he said he would be courteous, he wanted the Game Commission to know that the issues had impacts.

“It’s not right,” he said he would tell the commission. “Let’s get it straight.”