Millions of Social Security beneficiaries went into a lather, believing their Social Security benefits had been suspended. The erroneous alerts cascading through the online platform of the Social Security Administration (SSA) got huge disarray and anxiety, mainly by vulnerable Americans who rely on monthly checks to survive.
The erroneous alerts were supposedly triggered by glitches from the aging and almost crumbling computer systems in the SSA, hurting badly with payroll cuts and reduction of personnel.
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Outdated tech and job cuts in the federal sector
The SSA has been stuck in the dust for ages now, with the mismanagement of infrastructure; these days, any attempts at modernization have been hindered by aggressive cuts in federal agencies, particularly SSA, by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by the notorious Elon Musk.
DOGE’s cost-cutting measures have resulted in mass layoffs of the IT staff and an increased pressure on the remaining personnel to shove everybody online. Unfortunately, this leads to less available staff to diagnose and fix the systems when things go wrong, causing an increase in system failures that worsen the impact on operations.
An ex-SSA employee went on to warn that personnel cuts are directly leading to much longer wreck time and poorer services: “You lose staff with institutional knowledge, and when something breaks, it becomes really hard to fix that.”
MySSA portal outage and anti-fraud software failures
High-profile outages have affected the MySSA portal, an essential online resource for beneficiaries in managing their payments. Outages and disruptions in other internal systems affected users and did not allow the processing of new disability claims.
That was apparently compounded by anti-fraud software that had just been installed by DOGE. According to the Washington Post, the software launch was not preceded by proper stress testing for failure under high traffic, thereby triggering the false message recipients were told that they were “currently not receiving payments.”
Many of those affected were among the 7.4 Million Americans receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a program that aids poor elderly or disabled people.
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SSA investigating—but actual risks loom large
Some beneficiaries subsequently discovered that their payments had been unaffected. The SSA, however, has offered no cogent explanation. According to officials, the agency has been “actively investigating the root cause,” although unverified reports claim that the disruptions lasted an average of 20 minutes—except for the false payment notices that threw people into a frenzy for days.
But the lingering specter is: this could be a harbinger of far worse things to come. With many of the agency’s top software engineers leaving for the private sector, and amid an agency-wide scramble to move away from COBOL—considered an ancient programming language-experts predict an even greater technical instability.
Could the next real payment breakdown be on our threshold?
Critics maintain that DOGE’s diminished budget and tech mandates are a backdoor effort to diminish the SSA and limit payments without public accountability. In contrast, President Trump has assured that benefits are safe; an increasing number of glitches and resignations of key personnel seem to say otherwise.
A Baltimore staffer told The Post that in his payment systems team alone, a quarter of the members had either left or announced plans to leave: “We’re going to have cases that are stuck, and they’re not going to get fixed. People will be hanging for months without benefits.”
And for the beneficiaries out there, experts say, check your bank account and SSA messages often and report any discrepancies directly to the agency.
