FEC E-Filing Offline After Hacking Attempts

The US Federal Election Commission’s electronic filing system has been offline since Monday night, a week before the 3 November midterm elections. Reuters reported on Tuesday that the outage was triggered by hacking attempts against the agency, citing an email it had seen. The FEC itself has described the problem only as an outage.

What the FEC has said

The FEC’s status page opened an incident titled “FEC’s electronic filing system outage” at 10.15pm Eastern time on Monday, 26 October (02:15 GMT on Tuesday). It lists the online web forms, the electronic filing submission system and the filing tools used by software vendors as in “major outage”, and the FEC’s own FECfile+ application as partly down. The latest update, posted at 9.35am Eastern on Tuesday, says: “We are continuing to investigate this issue.”

A banner on the FEC’s homepage reads: “FEC’s electronic filing system is currently offline: We apologize for the inconvenience, and we’re continuing to work to resolve the issue.”

The agency posted on X at 13:45 GMT on Tuesday that “FEC’s electronic filing system is offline”. A later post, at 19:48 GMT, said: “Work continues to resolve the electronic filing system outage.” It added that the site’s other campaign finance data searches “remain available as do PDFs of reports”.

In a statement to Reuters, the FEC said “the FEC’s electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service”. It declined further comment. As of 19:51 GMT the system was still offline.

What Reuters reported

Reuters reported that the FEC’s website “has been targeted by a hacker or hackers”, disrupting the filing system, according to an email it saw. Reuters has not said who sent the email, who was behind the attempts or whether any data was accessed. The FEC has not confirmed a breach, and nobody has publicly attributed the activity to any person or group.

Reuters noted that the FEC “does not play a role in administering US elections” and said the outage “should have no effect on voters’ ability to cast ballots”. Votes are run by state and local officials, not by the FEC. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI did not immediately return Reuters’ requests for comment.

The status page also shows an earlier incident. In August the FEC took FECfile+ offline for three days while it investigated “a potential FECfile+ security vulnerability”, marking that incident resolved on 20 August. The FEC has not linked it to this week’s outage.

Why a filing outage matters in the final week

The FEC’s job is disclosure: it publishes who is raising and spending money on federal races. The last fortnight before an election is when that disclosure moves fastest. The FEC’s own reminder says campaign committees must report within 48 hours any contribution of $1,000 or more received between 15 and 31 October. Groups making independent expenditures that reach $1,000 or more for the same race between 15 October and 1 November must file 24-hour reports.

Those are exactly the filings Reuters says the outage is blocking. “I’ve never seen this in 26 years,” Steven Mele, a partner at compliance firm MBA Consulting Group, told Reuters. “The result is there will be less disclosure on the elections” until it is fixed.

That makes the outage a transparency problem rather than a voting problem. Ballots are unaffected, but journalists, rival campaigns and voters lose real-time sight of late spending while the system is down. The FEC has not said when filing will resume or whether any reporting deadlines will change.

Efforts to sway the midterms online have already drawn attention. Earlier this month X said it had suspended more than 13,000 accounts in three suspected foreign influence operations aimed at US politics. Public-sector web services have also gone dark elsewhere for unrelated reasons, such as the 32 UK government services taken offline after PHP2Shell. No link between the FEC outage and that critical PHP flaw has been reported.