Hawaii's business registration system has collapsed, and it's bad news for real estate deals, nonprofits, and anyone trying to start a business in the state.

• The state's Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs is four months and 40,000 filings behind, delaying real estate closings, nonprofit grants, and new business startups.
• A contractor hired years ago to build the system on the Salesforce platform didn't actually know Salesforce, so it kept hiring subcontractors who failed one after another.
• State lawmakers say IT leadership knew about the problems as early as 2023 but kept working with the same contractor instead of stepping in sooner.
• The office is now getting thousands of calls a month from desperate business owners and has no standard process for handling the overload.
• Salesforce itself has now sent a team of experts to fix the system for free, estimating it will take about 11 weeks to get things running again.

Outlook: Expect the backlog to keep growing for the next couple of months before Salesforce's team gets the system back online.