- The Social Security Administrations’ already-fragile computer systems are suffering more glitches than usual, according to reports. One breakdown recently resulted in the agency sending an erroneous message to millions of recipients that said their payments had ended, creating panic. That’s as critical IT staff are leaving amid steep payroll cuts.
The Social Security Administration’s already-fragile and antiquated technology has been having more glitches than usual, sources told CNN.
One example is last week’s outage of the MySSA portal, which allows Social Security recipients to manage their benefits online. Other cloud and internal systems were also impacted.
That came as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been slashing payrolls across the federal government. As a result, IT staff who maintain critical systems are shrinking and less able to fix problems. Meanwhile, SSA has been steering more people online as employees are cut and phone service is curbed.
In addition to massive staff reductions and greater demands on SSA systems, the agency is also updating technology as DOGE seeks to crack down on suspected fraud.
Many recent outages appear to have been caused by new anti-fraud software from DOGE that wasn’t tested at scale to see if it could withstand a high volume of users, sources told the Washington Post.
In one instance, many of the 7.4 million recipients of SSA’s Supplemental Security Income, which is separate from retiree benefits, got an erroneous message recently that said they were “currently not receiving payments,” the Post said.
The messages sparked widespread panic, though recipients later confirmed that monthly payments still showed up in their bank accounts, the report added. A separate glitch forced staff to cancel appointments because new disability claims couldn’t be entered into the system.
CNN, which earlier reported on the payment message, said some beneficiaries, who are low-income older Americans and people with disabilities, also couldn’t access their online accounts.
“Those are the risks,” a former SSA employee told CNN. “You lose staff that have the institutional knowledge, and when something happens, you can’t recover, or it takes you a lot longer to recover. The implication is American people get degraded services on the tech side because people internally are understaffed.”
SSA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but told the Post that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the disruptions, which averaged about 20 minutes each except for the erroneous payment message.
The increasingly frequent system outages have raised growing concern that the diminished IT staff combined with DOGE’s updates and access to key technical infrastructure could result in an actual disruption in payments.
While President Donald Trump has maintained that he won’t touch benefits, critics of DOGE have said its changes are part of a “backdoor” effort to cut payments and gut the agency.
Wired reported recently that DOGE is forming a team to migrate SSA’s computer systems off the archaic COBOL programming language in a matter of months.
One Baltimore-based staffer who works on payment systems told the Post last month that nearly a quarter of his team is gone or will soon be gone because of resignations and retirements. Those with top software skills are leaving the SSA to get high-paying jobs in the private sector.
As a result, several software updates and modernization processes that were supposed to be completed will likely miss their deadlines, and many of the experts who fix glitches that can stop payments are now exiting, the report said.
“That has to get cleaned up on a case-by-case basis, and the experts in how to do that are leaving,” the Baltimore employee told the Post. “We will have cases that get stuck, and they’re not going to be able to get fixed. People could be out of benefits for months.”