The agency says most affected services are back, allowing campaign groups to submit pre-election spending reports again after managers reset their passwords.
The US Federal Election Commission restored its electronic filing system on October 28 after nearly 41 hours offline to contain a cyberattack, Reuters said. The agency told users that most affected services had been restored, reopening a route for campaign groups to disclose spending before the November 3 elections.
During the outage, super PACs—political groups able to raise unlimited sums—and other groups could not file mandatory 24- and 48-hour reports showing spending to support or oppose candidates. That kept recent spending from public view. The FEC does not administer US elections, and the outage should not affect voters' ability to cast ballots.
At 4:50 p.m. EDT on October 28, the FEC’s incident page said electronic filing was available and a fix had been implemented. It classified the incident as “Monitoring,” rather than resolved. The notice lists online web forms, the electronic filing submission system and tools used by filing-software vendors as the affected components.
Campaign finance managers were required to reset their passwords before logging back in, an email reviewed by Reuters said. Whether all disclosures delayed during the outage have since been submitted and made public remains unknown, as does any timetable for clearing delayed reports.
An FEC officer told campaign compliance firms late on October 26 that the agency had taken services offline after a “bad actor” tried to breach its systems, an email reviewed by Reuters said. The agency posted its first investigating notice at 10:15 p.m. EDT that day. By 8:17 p.m. EDT on October 27, it said it had identified the issue and was implementing a fix.
The outage blocks 24-hour and 48-hour spending disclosures ahead of the November 3 elections as staff work to bring filing back online.
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The motive remains unknown. The FEC has not disclosed whether the attempted breach succeeded or whether any data was altered. The agency did not respond to requests for comment on October 28; the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency referred questions to it.
Kyle Sandy, cybersecurity director at IT security firm Logically, interpreted the shutdown as choosing a known outage over an unknown risk. He said taking systems offline gave the FEC time to check for data alteration before restoring service.
Brendan Glavin, research director at campaign-finance watchdog OpenSecrets, said super PACs and dark money groups, which do not disclose their funding sources, spent an average of more than $50 million a day in the week before the outage. More than $250 million in spending was reported on October 20 alone, he said. Those figures describe spending before the shutdown, not a measured total of disclosures delayed by it.
Molly White, a campaign-finance watchdog who tracks crypto and Big Tech political spending, said the outage prevented scrutiny of last-minute spending as the election approached. Before service returned, OpenSecrets executive director Hilary Braseth said delayed disclosure undermined public scrutiny of outside spending in the election’s final days.
The FEC’s October 28 homepage notice said help for filers would be available until 8 p.m. that day. With electronic filing available again ahead of November 3, the agency’s announced next step was to monitor the results of its fix.
