FEC e-filing is back after a reported hack: CoinDesk counts nearly $170 million from three crypto super PACs before the midterms

Update, 1 November 2026, 17:50 UTC: The FEC’s status page shows e-filing available again since 28 October at 16:50 EDT (20:50 UTC) and the incident closed on 30 October at 16:48 EDT (20:48 UTC); on 1 November it read “All Systems Operational”. CoinDesk counted on 1 November nearly $170 million spent by three crypto super PACs, $154 million of it by Fairshake and its affiliates, according to a spokesman. POLITICO reported an automated FEC email promising no fines for reports filed within 24 hours of the return, but Coindaro found no public FEC statement on late filings, and the agency still has not confirmed a hack.

The US Federal Election Commission’s electronic filing system is back. Its status page said on Wednesday 28 October at 16:50 EDT (20:50 UTC): “The electronic filing system is available. A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.” The incident was closed on Friday 30 October at 16:48 EDT (20:48 UTC) with “This incident has been resolved.” The system had gone down at about 10 p.m. Eastern time on Monday 26 October (02:00 UTC Tuesday), and at 17:45 UTC on 28 October, when Coindaro checked the FEC homepage, it was still offline. Reuters reported, citing an email, that a hacker or hackers had targeted the agency. The FEC has not confirmed a hack. Its notices speak only of an outage.

The reported FEC hack landed a week before the 3 November midterms, in the stretch when super PACs must disclose their spending within 24 hours. By 28 October, FEC records showed no new expenditures since Sunday from the main crypto industry-aligned super PACs, Fairshake and the Winklevoss twins’ Digital Freedom Fund among them, according to Cointelegraph. With the system back, CoinDesk published on 1 November a tally of nearly $170 million from three crypto super PACs, set out below. Coindaro could not run its own count of the filings made after the return.

FEC hack or outage: what the agency has confirmed

The FEC’s own words were short throughout. A post on its X account on Tuesday, quoted by the Daily Caller, read: “FEC’s electronic filing system is offline. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve the issue.” A spokesperson said IT staff were “actively working to restore service”, pointed to the status page and declined to give more details.

On Wednesday afternoon, before the fix, the homepage banner said the system “is currently offline” and that the agency was continuing to work on it, with a link to the status page. It gave no return date and no instructions for filers. By 1 November the homepage carried no notice about the outage.

The word “hack” comes from reporting, not from the FEC. According to an email obtained by Reuters and cited by CNBC, an FEC electronic filings official told campaign compliance firms on Monday night that a “bad actor” was attempting to breach the agency’s systems and that public-facing services had been shut down. Nextgov/FCW and Cointelegraph also credit Reuters with the first report.

Several things remained unsaid as of 1 November. Reuters wrote after the return that the FEC had not announced details about the cause. The agency has not named an attacker. It has not said whether anyone got into its systems, or whether any data was taken or changed. The FBI deferred questions to the FEC, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) did not respond to CNBC.

What went offline, and when

The status page lists the incident as affecting e-filing: the online web forms, the electronic filing submission system and the electronic filing vendor tools that committees’ software relies on. A notification email obtained by Nextgov/FCW added filing search features, the tools that validate campaign finance reports, and other feeds and channels.

The timeline on the status page is sparse. The first entry, “investigating”, was posted at 22:15 EDT on Monday (02:15 UTC Tuesday). Three updates saying the FEC was “continuing to investigate” followed, the last at 09:35 EDT on Tuesday (13:35 UTC). At 20:17 EDT on Tuesday (00:17 UTC Wednesday) the status changed to “identified”: the issue had been found and a fix was being put in place.

That was still the latest entry when Coindaro checked at 17:45 UTC on Wednesday, even though the email seen by Nextgov/FCW had promised another update on Wednesday morning. About three hours later the status moved to “monitoring”, with the 16:50 EDT notice quoted above: 42 and a half hours after the first entry. Reuters counted nearly 41 hours offline, said the system returned on Wednesday night, and quoted the FEC telling users that “most of the services affected by the outage have been restored.” A separate incident for the FECfile+ application was marked available at 19:10 EDT (23:10 UTC) the same day.

Already-filed data stayed available. The spokesperson told the Daily Caller that “the website search for FEC reports is not affected”, so past reports and searches by donor, recipient or committee kept working. When Coindaro read the status page on 1 November at about 17:45 UTC, it showed “All Systems Operational”. The FEC does not run elections, and no report suggests any effect on voting.

Crypto super PAC spending went dark in the 24-hour window

For the 3 November 2026 general election, the FEC’s calendar puts the 24-hour reporting period for independent expenditures from 15 October to 1 November. In that period a super PAC that spends $1,000 or more on ads, mailers or texts for or against a candidate has to report it within a day, as Cointelegraph summarised the rule. Candidates must report contributions of $1,000 or more within 48 hours during the final 20 days.

Those reports are the only near-real-time view of late money, and late money is large this year. Political committees and outside groups reported nearly $610 million in independent expenditures for communications sent out from 20 to 26 October, about $87 million a day, according to a CNBC analysis of FEC filings. Elon Musk’s America PAC alone reported nearly $6.8 million for communications disseminated on 20 October.

The regular pre-general report, due on 22 October, stopped at 14 October. The next full report, the post-general, is not due until 3 December. So while the 24-hour stream was blocked, for about two days in the final week of campaigning, the public had almost no fresh spending data.

Cointelegraph found exactly that gap for crypto money. On 28 October the FEC database showed no expenditures since Sunday 25 October from five crypto industry-aligned super PACs: Fairshake, Defend American Jobs, Protect Progress, Fellowship and Digital Freedom Fund.

Their last entries before the outage give a sense of the sums. Digital Freedom Fund, launched by Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, reported on Sunday more than $572,000 spent on text messages backing Republican Senate candidates, most of it for Ken Paxton in Texas. Protect Progress reported more than $50,000 for direct mail supporting Representative Aisha Wahab in California’s 14th district.

Ohio took the largest share of the crypto money

The largest sums sit in Ohio’s Senate race. Before the outage, Fairshake had reported $56 million in media spending against Democrat Sherrod Brown and for Republican Jon Husted, and Digital Freedom Fund more than $7 million in the same race, Cointelegraph reported. In 2024, Fairshake spent about $41 million against Brown, who lost his seat to Bernie Moreno.

Coindaro followed that money as it was filed. Our report on Fairshake passing $46 million against Sherrod Brown covered the early October lines, and our tally of crypto super PAC spending in Ohio, Nebraska, Texas and Iowa added later filings. The next chapter of that count is CoinDesk’s tally below; Coindaro has not yet added up the filings made since the system returned.

Fairshake did not reply to Cointelegraph’s request for comment in time for its story. Coindaro found no public statement from a crypto industry-aligned PAC on whether it held back filings during the outage.

CoinDesk’s count: nearly $170 million from three crypto super PACs

Three of the largest crypto super PACs spent nearly $170 million on the 2026 midterms, CoinDesk reported on 1 November, in a count that leaves out smaller donations and individual gifts from crypto executives, as well as dark money that need not be disclosed. Most of the visible money went to Republicans or against Democrats. All the figures in the table are CoinDesk’s, and its article names Fairshake, Digital Freedom Fund and Fellowship. Coindaro has not re-added them from FEC filings.

“Fairshake has always been and always will be an issue-focused organization,” spokesman Geoff Vetter told CoinDesk. The group claims success with as many as 53 primary candidates. Digital Freedom Fund, the Winklevoss vehicle, committed more than $8 million in all to stopping Democrats in Ohio, Texas and Iowa. Fellowship is funded by Cantor Fitzgerald, a firm CoinDesk describes as closely tied to Tether.

CoinDesk also writes that the money did not line up with how lawmakers voted on the Clarity Act: opponents were not punished and negotiators were not rewarded. That is its reading. Coindaro has not tested it.

What a Democratic Senate could mean for crypto bills, according to CoinDesk

Voters decide on Tuesday 3 November. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, Democrats 45, and two independents sit with the Democrats, who need to flip four, CoinDesk’s race guide says. It lists seven races the Cook Political Report rates as tossups: Ohio, Kansas, Alaska, Michigan, Texas, Iowa and Maine. Coindaro makes no forecast.

The committee scenarios are CoinDesk’s. If Democrats win the majority, it writes, Elizabeth Warren is waiting for the gavel of the Banking Committee. Brown, should he win in Ohio, could be considered for the chair of the Agriculture Committee, which oversees US derivatives regulation, but Senate leadership posts go by seniority and his was broken by his 2024 defeat, so his party would have to make an exception. With both in those seats, CoinDesk says, the Senate could turn hostile to digital assets. Neither appointment has been announced.

Dennis Porter, chief executive of the Satoshi Action Fund, told CoinDesk that “political power changes hands” and warned that attacking Brown could cost the industry support in the party it may have to negotiate with.

Either way the arithmetic stays. CoinDesk notes that a major crypto bill needs Democratic votes to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. The Clarity Act failed a procedural vote 49 to 50 on 15 September, as our 24 October tally reported, and the lame-duck session after the election is the next window, with no date set that we have seen.

The 2026 general election reporting calendar

The dates below come from the FEC’s published calendars for 2026, plus the outage times from its status page.

The pre- and post-general dates are on the FEC’s 2026 pre- and post-general reports page. The FEC page for the 24-hour period lists dates only; the $1,000 threshold is the one Cointelegraph described.

Late filings: a no-fine promise by email, no public FEC notice

The question for treasurers was whether a report blocked by the outage would count as late. An automated email sent to people who had tried to log campaign information, obtained by POLITICO, said the FEC would not fine campaigns for missing data “so long as they file within 24 hours after the electronic filing system is back online.” MultiState, a government affairs firm, reported the same condition on 28 October and added that the FEC cannot change statutory deadlines but can decide when to impose penalties.

Those two reports are all we have found. As of 1 November, Coindaro found no statement on late filings on the FEC’s status page, homepage or press release page, and no public word on how many reports arrived late, whether the promise was applied, or whether a paper or other fallback was available. Gabrielle Hempel, a security operations strategist at Exabeam, had put the question to Nextgov/FCW during the outage: “What is the backup process, how are filings received and disclosed while the system is down?”

The agency is also short of commissioners. The six-seat FEC has had only two members since October 2025 and has lacked the four votes it needs to take official action since May 2025, CNBC noted; career staff keep disclosures and daily operations running.

Hempel also warned that “disruptions like these can have a massive impact on public trust without ever actually touching a ballot.” No report suggests any vote was affected. Whether any spending from the outage days is still missing from the public record cannot be told from the agency’s statements so far.

The FEC was hacked once before, in 2013

In October 2013, as the federal government shut down, Chinese hackers crashed the FEC’s IT systems, the Center for Public Integrity reported. Its reporting also described chronic staffing shortages, and an audit the FEC later commissioned found other security problems. Representative John Mica, then chairing a House subcommittee on government operations, said he would investigate the extent of the breaches.

Nothing links that episode to the October 2026 outage, and no official has suggested a link.

Why crypto policy watchers care about a filing outage

Crypto companies and their founders have become large outside spenders in US federal races, and the reason is legislation. Congress failed to advance a crypto market structure bill in September, and Fairshake and other industry groups then backed lawmakers who had voted for it, Cointelegraph noted. Where that bill and the SEC and CFTC rules now stand is in our explainer on how US crypto rules are being written after the CLARITY Act stalled.

The filings are the record of who paid to shape the Congress that will vote on crypto laws. They show where the money went, not whether it changed any vote. The outage put a hole in that record, for about two days, in the stretch when spending usually peaks: political advertising for the 2026 midterms had reached $11.21 billion spent or reserved by Monday 26 October, a record, according to AdImpact data cited by CNBC.

The midterms run through crypto in other ways too. Polymarket said it had investigated dozens of midterm bets and sent at least two cases to the CFTC, as we reported in our piece on Polymarket’s midterm bet investigations.

For readers in France and Italy, the outage changed nothing directly: no AMF, Consob or OAM rule was involved, and no European filing system was affected. Its weight was political. The Congress elected on 3 November will decide whether the US passes a crypto market structure law, which shapes how US exchanges and token issuers operate worldwide.

What a super PAC and an independent expenditure are

A super PAC is a US political committee that can raise unlimited sums from companies and individuals but may not give money directly to candidates or coordinate with them. It spends instead on independent expenditures: ads, mail, texts and other messages that call for the election or defeat of a candidate. The 24-hour reports are how that spending becomes public before the vote.

Fairshake, Defend American Jobs, Protect Progress, Fellowship and Digital Freedom Fund file with the FEC like any other committee. The outage hit their disclosures exactly as it hit everyone else’s.

What to watch around 3 November

• A public FEC statement on late filings, and whether the no-fine promise in the email was applied.
• Any word on how many 24-hour reports arrived late, and on any spending from the outage days still missing.
• The filings of Fairshake, Defend American Jobs, Protect Progress, Fellowship and Digital Freedom Fund since the return, which Coindaro could not count on 1 November.
• Any word from the FEC, the FBI or CISA on whether there was an intrusion or data loss.

The 24-hour window runs to 1 November. Senate results in Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Nebraska start coming in on the night of 3 November, and the next full view of crypto PAC spending comes with the post-general report, due on 3 December.