Topeka ? The Kansas Department for Children and Families said Tuesday that a statewide computer outage that struck the agency over the weekend has been resolved and that its systems were up and running again.

“Happy to report, DCF computer systems are back up and running after an OITS outage. We appreciate your patience,” the agency posted on its Facebook page.

OITS refers to the Office of Information Technology Services, an agency that manages most of the state’s computer networks and services.

The outage began around 9 a.m. Saturday when OITS was performing some regularly scheduled maintenance, the agency said in an earlier Facebook post Monday. The outage affected multiple state agencies and networks, but it was a particular problem at DCF because it affected systems involved in such things as processing applications for benefits and reports of abuse and neglect.

Agency spokeswoman Theresa Freed said in an email Tuesday morning, however, that the outage did not affect the agency’s ability to make welfare benefit payments, which the Journal-World reported Monday, citing Twitter posts from the Kansas Organization of State Employees, or KOSE, a union that represents many DCF employees.

“Benefits are distributed on an ebt card, which is a contractor service, and they were already distributed in the 1st through the 10th of the month,” Freed said in the email. “KOSE shared inaccurate information.”

The weekend outage occurred just one week before DCF migrates one of its major computer systems — the one used to determine eligibility for both welfare benefits and Medicaid benefits — from a 1980s-era legacy mainframe system to a new web-based portal called the Kansas Eligibility Enforcement System, or KEES.

Freed said the outage over the weekend was not related to the migration to KEES. But she said that migration, which will begin shortly after 5 p.m. Friday, will result in an extended outage of the eligibility system.

“We anticipate that everything will be fully back online by early September,” Freed said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “During that time, we can still do lots of other aspects of the work.”

Much of the work involved in determining eligibility involves verifying an applicant’s income and household composition, tasks that can be done by DCF staff without the computer system.

“We can still do all that work, so essentially when the system is available once again, all we’re doing is data entry, which is a very small amount of the work that’s done in determining eligibility,” she said.

Freed said the agency is encouraging anyone who wants to apply for benefits to turn in their paperwork before Friday so they will have the best chance of receiving an early determination before the computer system is taken down for the transition to KEES.