Possibly tens of thousands of Student Payment claims have been “auto-rejected” by Centrelink, insiders claim.

Reports say hundreds of thousands of claims have been pushed through in a panicked haste, as Centrelink scrambles in the wake of its latest tech failure.

Centrelink claims the applications were handled properly, and has blamed the debacle on unforseen high demand. Still, huge delays caused hardship for many would-be students.

Some even missed out entirely, waiting up to four months for a process that is supposed to take four weeks.

Centrelink says its backlog of claims is now at about 27,500, after hitting 90,000 in March.

Fairfax Media reports say Centrelink has appointed a special national manager in a command centre just to tackle the student payment crisis, and taken on around 650 extra staff to help.

Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge maintains that the delays were caused by "unprecedented" demand, but the Fairfax reports say department bosses had seen the accurate forecasts of demand.

Instead, it claims that the “Customer First” software failed, despite being designed to speed-up claims, and there were not enough trained staff to pick up the mistakes.