The US Federal Election Commission has been targeted by a hacker or hackers, disrupting its electronic filing system one week before the November 3 elections, according to an email seen by Reuters.
In a statement, the agency said that "at this time, the FEC's electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service." The FEC declined to comment further on the outage.
A status message posted by the commission indicated the filing system had been down since around 10 p.m. ET on Monday, which was 0200 GMT on Tuesday. Users can still search the website for past reports.
The FEC tracks the spending of candidates and political committees. It does not administer US elections, so the outage should have no effect on voters' ability to cast ballots.
The disruption does, however, prevent organizations from submitting the FEC's 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports. These filings show how much political groups and others are spending on specific races.
The incident comes just ahead of the midterm elections, which will determine whether President Donald Trump's Republicans keep their majorities in Congress for the next two years.
An expert in political finance compliance said the outage is unprecedented in their experience and could reduce transparency. "I've never seen this in 26 years," said Steven Mele, a partner at MBA Consulting Group, a political finance compliance firm. "The result is there will be less disclosure on the elections" until it's fixed.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
