The Federal Election Commission's electronic filing system went dark Monday night and was still down Tuesday afternoon, leaving campaigns, parties and political action committees unable to submit fundraising and spending reports just a week before the Nov. 3 midterms. The agency has confirmed the outage but has refused to say what caused it.
What We Know About the Timeline
According to the Washington Post, the FEC began investigating an issue with its online systems around 9:30 p.m. Monday and confirmed the filing system was down by around 11 p.m. A status message from the agency separately indicated the system had been down since around 10 p.m. ET Monday, Oct. 26. The FEC said its information technology staff was actively working to restore service, though the outage stretched into Tuesday afternoon without resolution.
Crucially, the outage does not affect the public's ability to look up campaign-finance records. The Post's reporting notes that the FEC website the public uses to search filed reports was not touched by the problem, and as the KTSM report adds, the search function used to find campaign donations, recipients and political action committee information remained functional throughout. Nor does the outage touch voters' ability to cast ballots, per the Denver Gazette, which notes the FEC does not administer U.S. elections in the first place. What's frozen is the pipeline campaigns and PACs use to disclose their own activity.
Hacking Claim Disputed
The cause of the outage remains murky, and accounts conflict. FEC officials declined to say what caused the shutdown, including whether it stemmed from a hack, the Post reports. Reuters, meanwhile, cited an email indicating the FEC website was targeted by a hacker or hackers, though even that report acknowledged the precise cause of the outage was not clear, per the same KTSM account. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to the Denver Gazette's sourcing of the Reuters report.
The timing matters because campaigns and political groups are currently bound by expedited 24-hour and 48-hour reporting windows, the filings that show political groups' and others' spending on specific races in the final stretch before an election. Those reports — filed on Form 3X, Schedule E, by political committees and on Form 5 by persons who are not political committees, according to the FEC's own guidance — are supposed to give the public a near-real-time window into who's spending money to sway specific races just before voters go to the polls.
A Compliance Veteran Sounds the Alarm
Steven Mele, a partner at MBA Consulting Group, a political finance compliance firm, said he had never seen anything like this in 26 years and warned the outage would mean less election disclosure until the system is repaired, according to the Denver Gazette. That warning lands amid broader strain on the agency: the FEC has lacked the four commissioners required for official commission action since May 2025 and has had only two commissioners, both Democrats, since October 2025, the Post reports. The agency's full-time workforce has also shrunk, falling from 363 employees in 2002 to 293 in 2022 — a decline of roughly 19 percent, per the same Post account.
The outage arrives in the thick of the 2026 midterms, which will determine whether President Donald Trump's Republicans maintain their congressional majorities for the next two years, the Denver Gazette notes. The next major campaign-finance filing deadline isn't until after the general election, on Dec. 3, according to the Post.
