On Monday I did a series of posts about what SSI disability recipients and their parent-guardians were seeing on their Social Security portals. Peoples’ portals had the new language: “This beneficiary is currently not receiving payments.” As I noted, those people’s payments did eventually show up and on Tuesday, as of mid-afternoon, the portal issue was resolved as well. On Tuesday, I can now report, an internal SSA email was sent out notifying employees about the problem and that it had been resolved, in other words, more or less at the same time as TPM’s follow-up report. The problem, as the email put it, was that “customers received a message starting they are not receiving any Social Security payments after attempting to log into their mySSA account.” Interestingly, it goes on to say that the problem “began Monday, 03/31/2025, after a migration of services.”
Now, any large computer system servicing tens of millions of people will have occasional glitches and some number of backend migrations. The beneficiaries I spoke to said they’d never seen anything like this, in many cases after many years or even decades. It seems highly likely however that this migration wasn’t routine but part of the fiddling DOGE is currently doing in the SSA code base. I’m told that the team that managed the front-facing website has already been fired. And I’m additionally told that outages on the back-end SSA system — at least on the SSDI side — have gone up dramatically this week. For clarity this is the system that SSA employees use to work through to do their jobs.
Wired reported a few days ago that DOGE is demanding the entire COBOL-based SSA code base rebuilt from the ground up in a matter of months. If you’re not familiar with code bases and large computer systems, that’s like saying you’re going to prepare your mid-sized company’s taxes in an hour, or you’re going to write, edit and publish your novel in a week. That’s simply not how anything works. But a rising pace of glitches, outages and disruptions is precisely what you’d expect early in that process.
