The Federal Election Commission's electronic filing system remained offline on October 28 after a reported hacking attempt, delaying campaign-finance disclosures less than a week before the November 3 midterms. The agency said it had identified the problem and was implementing a fix, but its public tracker still listed a major outage.
The disruption affects the reporting of political money. The commission does not administer voting, and the outage should not affect Americans' ability to cast ballots. Previously filed reports remained searchable, according to the agency.
Filing services go offline at a critical moment
The FEC's public tracker identifies three affected services: online filing forms, the electronic submission system and tools used by filing vendors. The incident began on October 26. Its latest update said:
"The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented."
The cyberattack account comes from an agency email obtained by Reuters. An electronic filings officer told campaign compliance firms:
"We have a bad actor attempting to breach FEC systems. As a result, we've had to temporarily shut down our web facing services."
The message described an attempted breach, without identifying the attacker or saying whether it succeeded. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI referred questions to the commission. No technical explanation of the attempted intrusion was included in the email quoted in the report.
For campaign finance staff, the immediate problem is practical: reports that normally pass through the electronic system cannot be submitted that way while it is unavailable. Steven Mele, president and CEO of political finance compliance firm MBA Consulting Group, said he had never seen this happen in 26 years.
The disclosures voters are waiting for
The timing puts the outage inside the final reporting window before Election Day, when some political activity must be disclosed much faster than in routine quarterly filings.
Under the commission's October 13 reminder, campaign committees must disclose contributions of $1,000 or more received between October 15 and October 31 within 48 hours. PACs, party committees and others making independent expenditures totaling at least $1,000 for the same race between October 15 and November 1 must file 24-hour reports.
The outage interrupts the electronic route for getting those disclosures into the public record while voters are already making their choices.
Record advertising money raises the stakes
Ad-tracking firm AdImpact put political advertising spending and future reservations for the cycle at roughly $11.21 billion, according to the October 27 report. That exceeded the $11.2 billion recorded across races in the 2024 election cycle, which included the presidential contest.
It is an advertising measure, rather than a complete accounting of every campaign expense or a tally drawn from the delayed FEC filings. The two data sources answer different questions: ad tracking shows the scale of advertising, while campaign disclosures help reveal who is financing and making political expenditures.
The tracker's June forecast of $11.6 billion for the full cycle included Senate, House, gubernatorial, state legislative and downballot races. That broader advertising market reaches beyond the federal committees that report to the commission.
OpenSecrets research director Brendan Glavin said super PACs and dark-money groups had averaged more than $50 million a day in spending over the previous week. More than $250 million was reported on October 20 alone. He said the last-minute reports were crucial for following where the money was going and who was spending it.
The November 3 vote will determine whether President Donald Trump's Republicans keep their majorities in Congress. The disclosure delay comes as outside groups pour money into the closing days of those contests, reducing the time available for journalists, watchdogs and voters to examine new filings before polls close.
The agency's public incident page gave no deadline for restoring the filing services.