Social Security Website Crashes Blamed on DOGE Software Update

Elon Musk’s war on fraud and abuse has impacted the Social Security Administration’s ability to distribute payments, according to a new report. In particular, frequent outages of the agency’s website in recent weeks have been linked to its expansion of fraud checks earlier in the claims process. From the Washington Post: The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks. But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Socia ... Read full article.