Tech

Joe Biden, Indebted Americans Flood Student Loan Websites With Traffic, Break Them

Nelnet and MyGreatLakes.org are both down after Biden announced a student loan forgiveness program.
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Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The websites for two of the largest federal student loan providers have been hugged to death, presumably by millions of people checking to see whether President Joe Biden just disappeared some of their student loans with the stroke of a pen.

Biden announced Wednesday that he will cancel $10,000 in student debt for Americans making $125,000 or less annually, partially fulfilling a campaign promise. Immediately following the announcement, the websites for Nelnet.com and MyGreatLakes.org, two of the largest student loan administrators in the country, stopped loading, presumably because so many people were trying to check their balances at once. MyGreatLakes is owned by Nelnet. Nelnet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"In keeping with my campaign promise, my Administration is announcing a plan to give working and middle-class families breathing room as they prepare to resume federal student loan payments in January 2023," Biden tweeted. "I'll have more details this afternoon."

This continues a time-honored tradition of government and government-adjacent websites getting crushed by traffic after big announcements and during big launches. Most famously, the rollout of healthcare.gov was riddled with outages, and the USPS' website was temporarily crushed after Biden announced it would send out free COVID-19 tests.