US election finance site disrupted by hackers days before midterms

The US Federal Election Commission (FEC) took its website offline on Monday evening after detecting an attempted breach, disrupting the filing of campaign finance reports in the final week before the midterm elections on November 3.

In an email to a campaign compliance firm, the FEC said a “bad actor” was trying to breach its systems, leading to the temporary suspension of web-facing services, according to Reuters.

A status message on the FEC website confirmed the system went down after 10:15pm Eastern Time on Monday. An update posted Tuesday evening said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented. The outage prevents political groups and candidates from submitting the required 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports that track money in specific races.

The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency referred questions to the FEC, which does not administer elections but oversees federal campaign finance disclosures. Democratic FEC Commissioner Dara Lindenbaum clarified on social media that the incident had no connection to voter files or voter registration, which are maintained by individual states. She said the commission was working to restore systems as soon as possible.

The disruption comes amid record election spending. According to political advertising tracker AdImpact, the 2026 midterms have already seen $11.21 billion in advertising and reservations, surpassing the previous record set in 2024. Much of that money flows through super PACs and dark money groups, which have spent an average of $50 million per day over the past week, according to OpenSecrets research director Brendan Glavin.

Glavin described the FEC outage as “a big deal,” noting that in the final days of an election, the agency’s disclosures are “the only way for us to keep track of where the money is being spent.”