Elon Musk’s DOGE goons crashed the Social Security Administration website Monday when an apparent “anti-fraud upgrade” went badly wrong.
Several people reported being unable to access their online accounts, weeks after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began hacking the agency apart from the inside.
The cyber glitch prevented elderly people and low-income families from accessing and managing their information, applying for government services and making or receiving payments.
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DOGE’s tech staff appeared not to have tested anti-fraud measures to make sure they could deal with a high volume of users, The Washington Post reported.
The squad behind DOGE includes a crew of six young men under the age of 26, including a 19-year-old college freshman.
A message on the site for some users read, “We’re sorry, but the online service you requested isn’t available right now. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
The website crash has incited fear in several users, which has been increasing weeks after many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program were told they could not currently receive payments.
Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security policy at Arc, a non-profit for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said, “Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops.’ It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking bout a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands.”
Even when people are able to access the site, some people said they had been unable to sign into their accounts. Others found that after signing in, most of their information was missing.
The outage comes as President Donald Trump overhauls the agency. Around 7,000 workers have already been expelled since he took office and the administration plans to fire thousands more.
Musk has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” that sends checks to dead people, despite a 2024 inspector general report proving that less than one percent of the agency’s payments were wrong between 2015 and 2022.
The website crash isn’t the first symptom of problems after DOGE moved in. People have also reported long wait times on calls, the loss of direct deposit payments, and online accounts malfunctioning.
“At DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning... we’re going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes,” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy told reporters last week, Politico reported.
A court blocked DOGE from accessing sensitive SSA data in late March while another lawsuit challenged the government’s legal ability to implement mass layoffs.
