California’s political watchdog site was down for days during campaign season
A days-long web outage for California’s Fair Political Practices Commission is causing consternation for users and ripple effects for the agency.
The website and email outage, which began on April 10, comes weeks before the state’s primary election, on June 2. The FPPC is an invaluable resource for candidates and citizens, providing guidance on campaign rules, mandated financial disclosures, and a complaint portal, among other resources.
Former Assemblymember Mike Gatto, currently a partner at the law and consulting firm Actium LLC, ran into an issue with the site Tuesday afternoon.
“The FPPC is staffed by very hard-working people. But the outage has made it hard for a client of mine to file his major donor form,” he said in a text message.
Several others wishing to use the site expressed frustration on Facebook and X about not having access and being directed to send email, when email was not working.
On Tuesday afternoon, the FPPC canceled its April meeting, citing concerns about public access.
“In the interest of preserving meaningful opportunities for public participation and comment, the April 16th Commission Hearing has been cancelled,” read a message posted to the agency’s Facebook page. “This decision is intended to ensure that all interested parties have adequate time and access to engage once services are fully restored.”
All the items scheduled for the agency’s April meeting will be scheduled for its May 14 meeting instead.
A communication from the agency posted to X provides the clearest explanation for the outage, reading: “Because of issues related to the fiber optic network that connects to the FPPC’s infrastructure several services that the FPPC provides” have been unavailable since April 10.
FPPC spokeswoman Shery Yang said via text message that the FPPC’s website is available as of Wednesday but that “some services, including email, remain limited while the provider works to resolve the issue.”
“This was part of a broader service interruption and was not isolated to the FPPC,” she wrote. She did not elaborate on which other California agencies had experienced an outage.
Databases where users can search certain campaign finance filings from candidates remained offline Wednesday.
On the morning of Friday, April 10, the agency posted on Facebook that the website was “offline due to maintenance,” although it added its team was “actively addressing the issue” and would bring the site back online as soon as possible.
Yang did not have an estimate of when the site’s services would be restored, but said the agency will share updates as they become available.
This story was originally published April 15, 2026 at 3:28 PM.
