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The Federal Election Commission pulled its electronic filing system offline after someone tried to hack into it, leaving voters with no way to see the latest campaign spending just days before the most expensive midterms ever.

Getting into it: The agency started investigating around 9:30 p.m. ET Monday and shut down its web-facing services shortly after, warning campaign compliance firms in an email that a “bad actor” was trying to break in. The FEC said Tuesday night it had found the problem and was working on a fix, but the system was still down as of Wednesday.

The agency hasn’t said who did it, if they actually got in or if anything was taken. A person familiar with the investigation told Politico the attempt was narrow, caught early and may have involved AI hacking tools, though no one knows for sure. Older reports can still be searched on the FEC’s website, and campaigns won’t be fined for missing deadlines as long as they file within 24 hours of the system coming back.

The outage has nothing to do with voting itself, since the FEC doesn’t run elections, count ballots or keep voter rolls. What it does block are the fast-turnaround reports required in the last 20 days of a race, when candidates have 48 hours to disclose donations of $1,000 or more and outside groups have 24 hours to report big spending.

Ad spending this cycle has already hit a record $11.21 billion, and OpenSecrets says super PACs and dark money groups have been spending more than $50 million a day on average over the past week, and on Oct. 20 the reported total topped $250 million.

This all comes as the FEC is already barely functioning, with only two of its six commissioners in place and no quorum to take official action since May 2025.