Washington Post via MSN: “Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online. The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in. The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led 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 U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access. 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. 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 anti-poverty 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…”

See also Newsweek – “In a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, the SSA offered numerous updates on a plethora of cuts and changes that have begun since the Trump administration began…Recent reports of outages and problems with the SSA website have prompted a response from the agency, with it admitting it has “faced challenges.” “While the Social Security website has faced challenges, these issues predate the current administration,” the federal agency wrote on X on Monday. “Our new chief information officer has prioritized improving website uptime and resilience.” The website has experienced multiple crashes and errors in recent weeks. Earlier this month, some disability benefit recipients received notice on the My Social Security portal that they were no longer receiving benefits. The agency said that notice was a mistake..”