Developers and IT support staff who worked on the FAFSA form were hard hit in the Education Department’s layoffs Tuesday.
WASHINGTON, D.C., USA — The StudentAid.gov website, a key resource for student loans and financial aid, experienced a lengthy outage on Wednesday, emphasizing the potential consequences of the swift reduction in the Department of Education under President Donald Trump’s administration.
Beginning around midday Wednesday, numerous users encountered problems with FAFSA on Downdetector, preventing them from completing the necessary forms for financial aid applications at colleges across the country. Reports of technical difficulties and completion issues with FAFSA were also noted by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a professional group responsible for managing financial aid at educational institutions.
“We are seeking further information regarding the cause of the outage,” stated Allie Bidwell Arcese, a spokesperson for NASFAA. She highlighted the lack of communication from the Education Department regarding the disruptions, suggesting that the recent layoffs may have hindered the maintenance and troubleshooting efforts.
The developers and IT support staff who worked on the FAFSA form were hard hit in the Education Department’s layoffs Tuesday, along with staff buyouts and the termination of probationary employees. In all, the Education Department has reduced its staff by half, to roughly 2,000, since Trump took office.
A list of laid-off staff obtained and verified by AP shows more than 300 people cut from Federal Student Aid — two dozen of them from Federal Student Aid’s technology division. That included the entire team responsible for systems supporting the FAFSA form, a person with knowledge of the outage told The Associated Press, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation. While laid-off staffers are still technically employed until March 21, they had limited access to their email, phones and computers, making a response to the outage difficult, the person said. At one point Wednesday, about 70 people had joined a Teams call to try to pinpoint the cause of the outage.
The call continued for hours. By Wednesday evening, the website carried a banner claiming “Planned Maintenance” was underway, and login access was cut off.
The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on the outage.
Problems with the FAFSA had vexed the administration of former President Joe Biden, drawing rebuke from Republicans. The form was overhauled last year in an attempt to simplify it, but technical problems blocked students from submitting forms or bungled financial aid calculations.
Advocates had feared frustration would lead thousands of students to give up on going to college at all. But overall freshman enrollment at U.S. colleges increased over the previous year.
