Rappler, citing Reuters, reported that hackers targeted the US Federal Election Commission's website, based on an email Reuters saw. The agency's electronic filing system has been down since about 10 pm ET on Monday, a week before the November 3 elections. An FEC filing officer told compliance firms a bad actor was trying to breach its systems, so web-facing services were shut down for now. Past reports can still be searched.
The FEC said on Tuesday evening that the problem was identified and a fix was being put in place, but its notice still showed filing offline. The cyber agency CISA and the FBI passed Reuters's questions to the FEC. The reports do not say who is behind it, how far the attempt got, or when service returns. Reuters reports the FEC does not administer elections, so the outage should not affect voters' ability to cast ballots.
Analysis: the outage followed an attempted breach and a deliberate shutdown, so it may be a protective step. The reach of any intrusion is unknown. A filing portal is a single point of failure for transparency. Pulling an intake system offline limits what an intruder can reach, but it also pauses the public record. Ask your own team: how would we file or publish if our main system had to go dark, and who decides to pull it?