Social Security website keeps crashing, as DOGE demands cuts to IT staff

Boston Globe

07-04-2025

The problems come as the Trump administration's cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that hasled to
7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk's US DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division
responsible for the website and other electronic access.
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Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.
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The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example,
many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the antipoverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were 'currently not receiving payments,' agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.
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The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system.
'Social Security's response has been, 'Oops,'' said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and healthcare policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit that
advocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive.
'It's woefully insufficient when we're talking about a government agency that's holding someone's lifeline in their hands,' Milburn said.
The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency's cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.
The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.
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A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers, nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits, download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.
The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration's campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims.
'We're just spiking like crazy,' said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. 'It's people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It's the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.'
The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are 'actively investigating the root cause' of the incidents, which they called 'brief disruptions,' averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.
Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.
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The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment, and to check who has arrived, the employee said.
Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients' information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.
In other instances,
managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips, and started handing them out to people waiting in line.
The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion, initiated by the Trump team, of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses, and other personal information to verify customers' identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.
But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.
At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, 'While they've been brief, we prefer no outages.' He said the outages were under investigation and may involve 'challenges we've experienced with a number of partners.' Part of the problem may be that the outages
have occurred during 'high volume use of the network.'
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'Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?' Lemon said.
Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated.
In Upland, Calif., 72-year-old Kathy Stecher began trying to apply for retirement benefits more than a week ago. One of her first steps was to visit the Social Security website to book a required appointment at her local field office, because she believed she had to authenticate her identity in person first.
But over several days stretching from last week through Wednesday, the website would not let Stecher schedule a visit. The site displayed a small bar reading, 'Make an appointment,' she said, but whenever she clicked on it, nothing happened.
When she finally reached someone on the phone, the website's booking tool was not working, she said. The employee sighed and told her that similar problems have become routine, forcing customers to wait on hold for hours. So much was changing so fast at the agency, the employee said.
In recent weeks, Robert Raniolo, 67, a retired financial analyst in New York, found himself stuck when he tried to update his emergency contact by designating his niece instead of his wife, who has dementia.
Since he began receiving retirement benefits five years ago, Raniolo has never missed a payment or had trouble getting online, he said. But this time he got an error message - and kept getting them. 'Bad Request,' read one notification, according to a screenshot he provided to The Washington Post. 'There has been an unexpected system error,' read another.
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He was directed to try again during 'regular service hours' on the East Coast.
So Raniolo kept trying - three to five times a day, every day, for the next five days. He tried at different times. He tried using his phone instead of his Chromebook. He tried different internet browsers: Chrome, Edge, DuckDuckGo.
Nothing worked. By last Monday evening, he still had not managed to get into his account to change his emergency contact.
He has begun to imagine
the worst. What if something happens to him overnight, leaving his wife the only person authorized to communicate with Social Security on his behalf?
She probably would not know to call 911 if he collapsed on the floor, Raniolo said. She certainly would not understand how to manage or consider financial matters.
'If you were to call her right now, she wouldn't know how to answer the phone,' Raniolo said. 'That's why it's so frustrating to me I can't make a simple transaction on the Social Security website.'
In Westborough, Mass., outside Boston, last Monday, Chris Hubbard checked the Facebook feed where the statewide community of parents of disabled children receiving SSI benefits post news and information, and saw that a friend logging in to the Social Security website was notified that her child was not receiving benefits
.
Hubbard and her husband, Tom, have a profoundly autistic son. The monthly check to pay for the group home where he lives was ready to go into the mail the next morning, the first of the month, when his SSI check always hits his bank accounts. When Hubbard logged in, her son's account also showed 'no history of payments.'
'My mind was racing,' she recalled. She envisioned going through the agonizing process of reapplying for benefits for her son. She could notsleep and continued to check the website until 2:30 a.m. Same message.
On Tuesday, the check had finally been deposited by 9 a.m. But the message, now clearly an error, was still up on the website until that afternoon. 'The whole thing was very alarming,' Hubbard said.