The Federal Election Commission (FEC) said on Tuesday, October 27, that it had found the problem behind an outage of its online filing system and was fixing it. The outage began the night before, ahead of the United States (US) midterm elections on November 3. Reuters reported, citing an email, that the FEC told a campaign compliance firm a “bad actor” was trying to break into its systems. Al Jazeera and Newsweek both relayed that report. According to Al Jazeera, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) both referred questions to the FEC.
What Stopped Working
With the system down, groups could not send in the 24-hour and 48-hour reports on spending in specific races. Al Jazeera says a notice on the FEC website put the start of the outage just after 10:15 pm Eastern time on Monday, October 26. It adds that at 8:17 pm on Tuesday, a new notice said the problem had been identified and a fix was being put in place. Some things kept working. FEC deputy press officer Myles Martin told Newsweek on Tuesday that the search for FEC reports on the website was not affected. An eSecurity Planet report said filing still showed as offline on October 28. We could not confirm whether it has since been restored, so check the FEC’s own status page.
What Is Not Confirmed
The FEC has confirmed the outage. According to Newsweek, it has not publicly confirmed a hacking attempt. The agency has not said who may be behind it, whether anyone got into its systems, or whether any data was accessed. The hacker claim comes from an email seen by Reuters, not from an FEC announcement, and Al Jazeera says the hack was “reportedly” carried out. None of the sources we read names an attacker. Newsweek adds that an organisation may shut down its services after a hacking attempt even if the attacker never got in.
Why It Matters
This is not an attack on voting. The FEC does not run elections, and Newsweek says the outage should not affect anyone’s ability to vote. Al Jazeera reports that FEC Commissioner Dara Lindenbaum, a Democrat, wrote on X that voter files and registration are kept by the states. The damage is to transparency about money. With electronic filing offline, groups cannot send the 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports that show where money is going in the final days of a race. Al Jazeera, citing the tracker AdImpact, says about $11.21 billion has been spent on ads and future ad bookings, just above the $11.2 billion record from 2024. Steven Mele, a partner at MBA Consulting Group, told Reuters, as quoted by Newsweek, that he had “never seen this in 26 years” and that there will be less disclosure until the system is restored.
Our Analysis
This is our own reading, not a stated fact. Shutting the system down looks like a careful move after a possible break-in attempt. But the FEC has shared very little, and that leaves room for guessing. We expect more questions for the FEC about what happened and whether any records were touched.
