The Federal Election Commission has taken its electronic filing system offline after a reported attempt to breach its systems, disrupting campaign finance disclosures in the final days before the 3 November midterms.
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An FEC electronic filings officer told campaign compliance firms that a “bad actor” was attempting to breach the agency’s systems, prompting a temporary shutdown of web-facing services. The outage began late on 26 October. The Commission confirmed that its electronic filing system was offline and that IT staff were working to restore service. Previously filed reports remained searchable.
By the evening of 27 October the agency said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented. Status updates continued into 28 October as monitoring of the restored systems took place. The FEC does not administer elections or handle ballots, so the outage has no direct effect on voters’ ability to cast ballots. It does, however, interrupt the timely public disclosure of certain late contributions and independent expenditures that committees are required to report in the final stretch of a campaign.
The disruption arrives as outside spending and last-minute contributions typically surge in competitive races. Mandatory 24-hour and 48-hour reporting windows for large contributions and expenditures are affected while the system remains unavailable or under recovery.
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