What happened and what the FEC has said
The FEC's online filing portal has been unavailable since about 10 p.m. ET Monday. An official in the agency's electronic filings office told campaign compliance vendors that night that a "bad actor" was attempting to breach FEC systems and that public-facing tools were taken offline, according to an email reviewed by Reuters.
By Tuesday evening, the commission said it had identified the underlying problem and was putting a fix in place. Early Wednesday, the system remained offline, and the FEC told CNBC its IT team was working to bring the service back up.
The agency has not named a culprit, and it has not said whether its systems were accessed or any data exposed. Reports filed before the outage can still be searched.
Why the timing matters
Over that same stretch, political committees and outside organizations have to report specified spending within 24 hours. The goal is near-real-time transparency when cash surges late.
That flow is big. A CNBC review of filings shows Elon Musk's America PAC logged almost $6.8 million in independent spending for communications that went out on Oct. 20. More broadly, from Oct. 20 through Oct. 26, committees and outside groups logged nearly $610 million in independent spending on communications, which worked out to roughly $87 million per day.
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Bigger backdrop for the outage
This blackout lands amid a record price tag for the 2026 midterms on political ads. AdImpact tallied $11.21 billion spent or booked as of Monday night.
It also hits a diminished regulator. The FEC has six seats but has been down to two commissioners since October 2025 and has not had the four commissioners required for formal action since May 2025. Career staff are still processing disclosures and running daily operations. The FBI referred questions back to the commission, while the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency failed to answer a request for comment.
The investor angle
Campaign cash disclosures are a fast signal for which races and issues are drawing real money, which in turn shapes policy odds and sector risk. An outage that slows that flow of information can briefly widen the gap between those who already placed bets and everyone else trying to track the late money.
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