The United States Federal Election Commission restored its electronic filing system on Wednesday night after taking it offline for nearly 41 hours to contain a cyberattack. The outage temporarily hid spending by big donors and political groups just days before the midterm elections on 3 November. The regulator said most of the affected services had been restored, after first flagging major outages across its filing systems on Monday night.

Disclosure went dark at the worst moment

Campaigns and political groups were unable to file the mandatory 24-hour and 48-hour reports that disclose last-minute spending on specific races. Campaign finance watchdogs warned that the blackout removed public visibility exactly as spending accelerated, with super PACs and dark-money groups averaging more than $50 million a day in the week before the outage, according to OpenSecrets figures cited by Reuters, which put 20 October spending alone above $250 million. The filing system had been down since about 10 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, and an agency email described a bad actor attempting to breach its systems.

Voting itself not affected

The commission does not run elections, and Reuters reported that the outage should have no effect on voters' ability to cast ballots. Access to previously filed reports was not affected, and the public could still search the commission's online database while new filings were blocked. Reuters also reported that it could not establish a motive for the hacking attempt, and the commission has not named the attacker. What is clear is the timing: a disclosure system built for the final days of a campaign went dark for almost two days, and the spending it concealed will only become fully visible as the delayed filings catch up.

Sources: Reuters, Daily Caller.