The SNAP Network Goes Down Nationally, Leaving Millions Of Recipients Out of Pocket

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides low-income families with benefits to supplement their food budget, suffered a nationwide outage on Sunday, according to news reports. The cause of the outage, which reportedly affected millions of recipients, is unknown.

On Sunday several state agencies that help the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service administer the SNAP program locally posted on Twitter or issued statements acknowledging the outage, according to multiple news outlets. Down Detector, an online service from Ookla LLC, was among the first to report the outage. It tracks the uptime status of online and mobile services from sources such as Twitter and reports submitted on its Web site and mobile apps. 

The outage exposes the vulnerability of payment systems, such as electronic benefits transfers, that run on proprietary networks, says Ben Jackson chief operating officer at the Innovative Payments Association.

“SNAP runs on its own rails so there is not necessarily an alternate network it can switch over to when an outage happens,” Jackson says. “If a payments network doesn’t have a backup system through which to send benefits or provide recipients access to benefits, such as ATMs, it should certainly be thinking about it.”

While the extent of the fallout from the outage is hard to gauge at this point, Jackson says communications with recipients in the coming days and weeks will be key for the FDA and state agencies it partners with on SNAP. One possibility would be a text campaign to reassure recipients the system is functional again and their benefits are safe.

“An outage can shake confidence in the system, and there is likely going to be a lot of calls to customer service to verify benefits,” Jackson says. “Recipients are also going to be worried the system has been hacked, which means they won’t necessarily feel the system is safe. That’s why there needs to be coordinated communications between the USDA and the states to recipients to restore confidence in the system.”