FEC filing system offline after attempted breach

The Federal Election Commission took its web-facing services offline on Monday night after a bad actor attempted to breach its systems, blocking the 24 and 48 hour campaign spending reports due in the final days before the November 3 midterms.

Why it matters: The outage removes near real-time disclosure of late campaign spending in the most expensive US election on record, at about 11.21 billion dollars in advertising spending and reservations tracked by AdImpact, while voter registration and voting systems are not involved.

Data as of Reuters reporting read in full in this run via Al Jazeera (published October 28, 2026), quoting an FEC electronic filings officer's email to campaign compliance firms and the FEC's own status messages; the commission's status page was not read directly in this run, and the FEC is logged in SOURCES-TO-IMPLEMENT.md from this run. No successful intrusion, data theft or attribution is established in the reporting. Developing item.

The Federal Election Commission’s electronic filing system went down at about 10 p.m. ET on Monday, and an FEC electronic filings officer told campaign compliance firms that night that a bad actor was attempting to breach FEC systems and that the commission had had to temporarily shut down its web-facing services, Reuters reported. A status update at 8:17 p.m. ET on Tuesday said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented, and previously filed reports remained searchable throughout.

The outage blocks the 24 and 48 hour reports that committees and outside groups must file on late spending. Super PACs and dark money groups have spent an average of about 50 million dollars a day over the past week, according to Brendan Glavin of OpenSecrets, cited by Reuters. FEC Commissioner Dara Lindenbaum said the incident has nothing to do with voter files or voter registration, which states maintain, and the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency referred questions to the FEC.

FEC filing system offline after attempted breach

Sources