There was a massive outage on the website students use to fill out their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The studentaid.gov website was down for hours on March 12, shortly after the U.S. Department of Education laid off half its workforce.
According to the Hill, Downdetector found hundreds of users reported outages on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The FAFSA is used by students currently enrolled in or applying to college to receive financial aid.
The FAFSA outage comes one day after the Department of Education announced it fired more than 1,300 people. According to the Associated Press, at least 300 of those laid off were from the Federal Student Aid department, and nearly two dozen were in the technology department.
“There was a glitch on the FAFSA identify verification backend, which is managed by an FSA vendor. FSA staff was able to solve it within a matter of hours,” a spokesperson for the department stated. “This was unrelated to the RIF as no FSA staff are responsible for operations of these systems; they are managed by vendors.”
The Hill reports that a department official said there was an issue with a firewall misconfiguration installed by a contractor in November. A new feature recently installed by a different contractor caused a hiccup in the system before it was fixed.
The site and forms were reported back up as of Thursday.
Federal Judge Rules Laid Off Federal Employees Have Jobs Reinstated
It remains unclear whether the 1,300 people expected to be laid off will get their jobs back. A U.S. District judge in San Francisco ruled that thousands of federal employees fired by the Trump administration must be offered job reinstatement. The judge says the employees were terminated unlawfully.
“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employees and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that is a lie,” Judge William Alsup, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, said on the bench before his ruling, NPR reports.
An appeal is likely.
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