The US’ Federal Election Commission has disabled its online filing service due to attempts by a “bad actor” to breach the organisation, the FEC said in an email reported by Reuters, halting election funding disclosures in the critical final few days before midterm elections on 3 November.
“We have a bad actor attempting to breach FEC systems. As a result, we’ve had to temporarily shut down our web facing services,” an FEC electronic filings officer said an email to several campaign compliance firms on Monday night, according to the Reuters report late on Tuesday.
The outage means campaign groups can’t file the FEC’s 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports, which show how much political groups and others are spending on specific campaigns.
“At this time, the FEC’s electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service,” the FEC said in a statement provided to Silicon UK.
Image credit: Markus Spiske/Pexels
Record spending
Users are still able to search the FEC website for past reports, the commission said.
A status message said the FEC filing system had been down since around 10 p.m. ET on Monday (2 a.m. GMT on Tuesday).
The FEC sent the message after campaign finance officers found they could not file mandatory reports on Monday, the Reuters report said.
Roughly $11.21bn has been spent on advertising and future reservations for the elections so far, according to AdImpact, surpassing the previous record of $11.2bn spent in 2024.
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