SEC’s EDGAR Corporate Filings Database ‘Operating Normally’ After Technical Issue

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s corporate filings database, EDGAR, reportedly suffered “intermittent issues” on Monday (Oct. 20), making this financial information only sporadically available.

According to a Monday Bloomberg report, the SEC announced the issue on its website.

“Intermittent issues are preventing the display of disseminated filings on SEC.gov,” the notice said, per the report, which was published at 4:05 p.m. on the East Coast. “As a result, submissions that have been accepted may not be reflected on SEC.gov.”

The regulator did not cite a reason for the problem, according to the report.

As of 7:36 p.m. on the East Coast, that announcement on the SEC’s Edgar News & Announcements page had been replaced by a banner reading: “The technical issue has been resolved. EDGAR is operating normally.”

According to the Bloomberg report, the SEC has been operating on a “bare-bones basis” with 90% of its staff furloughed during the government shutdown but said it would keep EDGAR operating.

In an Oct. 1 post on X, the SEC said: “Our plan calls for the continuing operation of certain Commission systems, including EDGAR. We plan to post any changes in operational status on SEC.gov.”

An “SEC Operational Status” banner on the home page of the regulator’s website said that the SEC is operating in accordance with its plan for operating during a shutdown and that until further notice, it will have “a very limited number” of staff members available, that they will respond to emergency situations, and that the agency plans to continue operating certain SEC systems, including EDGAR.

Monday’s intermittent issues with EDGAR occurred on the same day that an AWS outage briefly shuttered broad swaths of the internet, though there are no reports that the two incidents are related. That outage impacted millions of people and large portions of the internet around the world.

It was reported in 2017 that the EDGAR database for corporate filings was hacked during the previous year and could have been used for insider trading. The report said that the corporate reports filed with the SEC don’t contain very sensitive information, but that people were shocked by the breach.