PAC panic: The spending reports were there all along

A viral Instagram post making its way around Georgia in the final full week before the midterm claims the Federal Election Commission was hacked — and that this is why the Super PAC reports supposedly due every 24 hours can’t be seen right now. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and the post lands in the exact stretch when Georgia voters are getting their heaviest wave of campaign advertising.

It’s not what happened. The FEC pulled its own filing system offline on the night of Monday, October 26, after staff began investigating an online-systems problem around 9:30 p.m. and confirmed the filing system was down around 11 p.m. (The Washington Post). An FEC electronic-filings officer told campaign-compliance firms in an email that a bad actor was attempting to breach FEC systems and that the agency had temporarily shut down its web-facing services. The next day, Tuesday, October 27, the FEC’s status page said the problem had been identified and a fix was being implemented (Business Standard), even as the filing portal stayed offline into Wednesday (KMBC). The reported intrusion was an attempt, not a completed hack, and previously filed reports stayed searchable throughout the outage (NBC News). The shutdown was a precaution, not a cover-up.

A $43 million race, briefly harder to track

The outage struck at a moment when federal campaign-finance disclosure matters enormously in Georgia. As of October 25, 2026, $42,958,217 in outside spending had already been reported in the Georgia U.S. Senate race between Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff and Republican challenger Mike Collins, according to OpenSecrets — $16,587,665 against Democrats, $14,590,176 against Republicans, $6,153,355 for Republicans, and $5,627,020 for Democrats (OpenSecrets). The contest is part of a record national surge: more than $2.4 billion in outside spending had flowed into federal races nationwide through October 13, 2026 (The Current).

Separate from the FEC’s federal system, Georgia runs its own disclosure portal through the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission, so state-level campaign and committee records have remained available while the federal filing system was down (Georgia Campaign Finance Commission).

The 24-hour rule, explained

The viral post’s “every 24 hours” shorthand is loose. Under FEC rules, a 24-hour report is required when an independent expenditure of $1,000 or more is made during the final 19 days before an election, due by 11:59 p.m. the day after the spending is made public; a 48-hour report applies to independent expenditures of $10,000 or more earlier in the period (FEC). In an automated notice to committees during the outage, the FEC said committees unable to file while the system was down should file as soon as possible after the system is restored, and that reports filed within 24 hours of restoration would not be subject to administrative fines (IBTimes UK).

That means the Super PAC spending records are not gone for good — they are posting late, a delay that makes scrutiny harder for a few days rather than a permanent end to it.

Where to look

Once the system is restored, the late Super PAC reports will land in the FEC’s public searchable database at fec.gov, where previously filed reports remained searchable throughout the outage (FEC). For Georgia’s own state-level campaign money, the Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission’s portal remains separate and available right now (Georgia Campaign Finance Commission).