Some Social Security benefit recipients told they’re not getting payments

Millions of Americans who rely on government assistance were left alarmed this week after logging into their online accounts with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and discovering a message falsely claiming they were no longer receiving payments.

The erroneous alerts, which affected recipients of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) came during a series of website outages tied to internal agency upheaval and untested system changes, according to The Washington Post.

Why It Matters

SSI provides monthly payments to people with limited income and resources who are either 65 or older, blind, or disabled. Approximately 7.4 million people in the United States receive SSI benefits.

The disruption came amid sweeping job cuts and downsizing efforts at SSA under directives from the Trump administration and Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which recently cut 50,000 jobs from the agency.

What To Know

For nearly two days, the SSA’s website displayed messages stating that recipients were “currently not receiving payments,” according to The Washington Post.

While payments were ultimately deposited as scheduled, the confusion triggered widespread panic among users. The Washington Post reported that some beneficiaries spent hours rechecking the portal or reaching out to overwhelmed phone lines, fearing a sudden loss of essential income.

DOGE’s changes to the SSA’s technology division have coincided with repeated outages and access issues across its digital services, including authentication failures, crashed scheduling tools, and blocked disability claim systems.

The outages have lasted between 20 minutes to a full day as DOGE downsized the technology division by 50 percent and pushed many of Social Security’s in person services to its website. On April 14, the SSA will start identity verification services solely online as opposed to in offices, as it was historically offered to seniors.

“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,'” Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health care policy at the Arc, a nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities, told The Washington Post. “It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands.”

The SSA has acknowledged challenges in its benefit programs, including recent backlash over its resumption of 100 percent benefit claw backs for overpayments.

Starting March 27, the agency reinstated a policy allowing it to reclaim overpayments at the full amount of a recipient’s monthly check—a practice that had been scaled back in 2023 following media investigations and complaints from recipients who received sudden, massive bills for amounts they didn’t know they owed.

According to the SSA, only new overpayments after March 27 will be subject to the full claw back rate, and SSI recipients remain protected under a separate cap of 10 percent.

The policy change is expected to recover $7 billion over a decade, according to the SSA.

Newsweek reached out to the SSA for comment via email.

What People Are Saying

Wayne Lemon, SSA deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, said at an operations meeting on March 28: “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.”

Former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley said in a statement last August: “People in our communities who need this crucial safety net deserve the dignity of an application process that is less burdensome and more accessible than what we now have, and we’re committed to achieving that vision over the next few years.”

Kevin Thompson, the CEO of 9i Capital Group and the host of the 9inning podcast, told Newsweek: “It seems DOGE didn’t adequately test for or anticipate this level of traffic. But when you direct everyone to apply online and 10,000 people become eligible every single day, well… the math isn’t that complicated. For such supposedly smart people, this feels like a basic oversight.”

Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek: “When government systems fail, it’s always the most vulnerable who feel the earthquake first. The recent SSA website glitch created unnecessary panic among those who can least afford uncertainty.”

Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor for the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek: “There’s a reason some Social Security recipients are concerned. If you logged into an account that was a key source of your monthly income and saw you were no longer going to be accepting payments, you would fear for your financial future.”

What Happens Next

The SSA continues to face internal strains, including staffing shortages and office closures, which watchdogs warn could contribute to more errors and delayed assistance for recipients.

“The real risk here? Missed payments. And for many, that’s not just an inconvenience—it’s critical. This could mean skipping a prescription, missing rent, or going without food,” Thompson said. “A delayed payment could become a matter of survival for some individuals.”