The U.S. midterm election is at risk as attempted cyber intrusion prompted the shutdown of web-facing services at the U.S. Federal Election Commission, including its electronic campaign finance filing system.
According to an email sent to campaign compliance firms and reported by Reuters, the agency has since said it’s working to restore service Tuesday.
An officer in the FEC’s electronic filings office wrote that a “bad actor” was attempting to breach FEC systems and that web-facing services had been temporarily shut down as a result.
The FEC confirmed its electronic filing system was offline and said IT staff were working to restore it. The agency’s public status page shows the disruption began Monday evening.
At about 9:29 p.m. EDT Oct. 26, the FECFile+ filing submission service was first flagged, with a broader electronic filing outage logged at 10:15 p.m. By 8:17 p.m. EDT Tuesday, the page said the cause had been identified and a fix was being implemented.
Steven Mele, president and CEO of compliance firm MBA Consulting Group, said of the outage: “I’ve never seen this in 26 years,” as reported by Reuters.
It remains unclear whether the attempt resulted in unauthorized access, whether data was viewed, altered or taken, or who was behind it. It is also unclear whether the agency is trying to hide the incident.
The operational impact is on campaign finance disclosure, as the electronic filing system is the channel for mandatory reports by candidates and committees, including 24-hour and 48-hour reports that disclose spending on specific races in the final days of a campaign.
Those reports could not be submitted while the system was down. The agency posted its outage notice after filers were unable to file late Monday.
Not all FEC services were down. The agency said searches of previously filed reports remained available, and a post on X said other campaign finance data searches and PDFs of reports were still accessible.
The status page on Oct. 28 listed the electronic filing submission system, online web forms and vendor tools as major outages and FECFile+ as a partial outage, while campaign finance data and report images were listed as operational.
The timing adds significance. The outage came about a week before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. The FEC does not administer elections, and the outage should not affect the ability to cast ballots, but it affects public tracking of late campaign spending.
Outside groups reported $476.1 million in independent expenditures during the week of October 19, an average of about $68 million a day, according to The Political Group’s PAC Spend Tracker 2026
Past audits illustrate long-standing risks to systems that support U.S. election oversight.
Reporting in 2012–2013 documented serious vulnerabilities at the FEC itself, including malware that remained on a commissioner’s computer for months and what agency leaders and DHS officials at the time described as among the most serious intrusions in the commission’s history, attributed to China during the government shutdown.
Separately, in December 2016 the Election Assistance Commission — a different agency that certifies voting equipment confirmed a potential intrusion after a Russian-speaking actor exploited an SQL-injection flaw to obtain credentials for more than 100 accounts, including some with administrative privileges, and attempted to sell access.
The latest update verified in the FEC’s Tuesday evening notice that a fix was being implemented, with the filing submission system still listed as down.
