Social Security website crashes as agency pushes users online

The Social Security Administration said it’s investigating the cause of recent incidents that have prevented beneficiaries from accessing their online accounts, after the portal went down temporarily.

The MySSA portal, which allows Social Security recipients to manage their benefits online, experienced a “full outage” Monday morning, according to a system notice sent to agency employees.

“There have been a couple of recent incidents impacting ‘My Social Security’ and we are actively investigating the root cause,” SSA spokeswoman Nicole Tiggemann said in a statement. She said the website itself remained operational during the incidents, but “some people may have experienced a problem signing in to their personal ‘My Social Security’ account.” 

The outage is the latest in a series of once-rare system crashes that have happened in recent weeks. The agency has pushed users toward online and in-person services — and away from the telephone — as part of an effort to increase efficiency and crack down on alleged fraud.

Monday morning’s outage also impacted a number of other cloud and internal systems used by the agency. 

Social Security’s systems and databases have been a key target of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency as it seeks to find waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy. Musk’s team has sought to access Social Security numbers, names, as well as birth and death dates of the program’s beneficiaries.

As DOGE teams have embedded in the agency, the SSA has rolled out a series of measures in what’s been billed as an effort to minimize fraud and improve efficiency. Over the weekend, the agency rolled out a new feature that allows Social Security beneficiaries to upload documents and forms without assistance from agency technicians.  

DOGE has deployed at least 10 staffers to the Social Security Administration to identify waste. But the agency’s data do not support claims of widespread fraud: From 2015 through 2022, Social Security estimated that it made almost $72 billion in improper payments — less than 1% of benefits paid, according to an inspector general report last year.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com