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 C-Span. | C-Span C-SPAN 'investigating' why congressional livestream switched to Russia Today 
 
 On Thursday afternoon, C-SPAN's online live video coverage of Congress abruptly switched to a live feed of the Kremlin-backed news channel Russia Today. The livestream continued to show RT for about 10 minutes, before switching back to C-SPAN. 
 
 The sudden cut to RT, an English-language network funded by the Russian government, happened at about 2:30 p.m., while Rep. Maxine Waters was speaking about SEC regulation. 
 
 Deadspin editor Tim Burke, who was watching the C-SPAN livestream at the time, recorded a video of the sudden switch. 
 
 "This afternoon the online feed of C-SPAN was briefly interrupted by RT programming," the network confirmed in a statement. "We are currently investigating and troubleshooting this occurrence. As RT is one of the networks we regularly monitor, we are operating under the assumption that it was an internal routing issue." 
 
 "We don't believe that we were hacked," a statement from the channel released late Thursday said in part. "We take our network security very seriously and will continue with a deeper investigation, which may take some time." 

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 Noting that RT is among the news feeds it regularly monitors, it said: “We don’t believe we were hacked. Instead, our initial investigation suggests that this was caused by an internal routing error. We take our network security very seriously and will continue with a deeper investigation, which may take some time.” 
 
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 RT America, which is broadcast by cable companies within the United States, did not respond to an email requesting comment on Thursday afternoon. 
 
 A recent declassified intelligence report accused Russia of interfering in the election and said that RT “aimed at undermining viewers’ trust of U.S. democratic procedures.” 
 
 C-Span — a private company that, according to its website, is available in 100 million American homes — receives no government money but broadcasts all live congressional proceedings, providing a direct feed of the daily stuff of politics to Americans who find themselves interested in what their representatives are doing. 
 
 Howard Mortman, a network spokesman, said he could not provide numbers for C-Span’s online viewership at the time of the interruption. 
 
 C-Span’s newsroom monitors many other channels for breaking news, including domestic networks like CBS and CNN as well as various international networks. Its statement suggested that a routing error had caused the RT feed it regularly monitors to be broadcast accidentally. 
 
 Mr. Mortman said the network’s early explanation for the interruption came from an internal analysis. He said that he was not aware of any previous such interruption. 
 
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 Timothy Burke, the video director at Deadspin, who regularly monitors 20 to 30 online news feeds from his home in Tampa, Fla., was among the first to comment on Twitter about the sudden interruption. He said he had assumed “somebody just flipped a wrong switch somewhere.” 
 
 Had Mr. Burke and others who were watching C-Span online at the time not been interrupted, they would have heard Ms. Waters mention Russia and President-elect Donald J. Trump several times before she ended her turn on the floor. 
 
 In a phone interview Thursday, she was perplexed. She said no one had satisfactorily explained “how this happened or why it happened, or if it’s happened before.” 
 
 “I just think it’s strange,” Ms. Waters said. “At a time when our intelligence agencies are very confident and basically have confirmed that Russia hacked the D.N.C. and other political interests, and then we have, while I’m on the floor of the House, talking about Trump and Russia, I get interfered with and interrupted by Russia Today.” 
 
 “It’s strange. It’s odd,” she said.
– C-SPAN says it's looking into a weird incident Thursday afternoon, when live coverage of Congress was replaced by the Kremlin-funded news channel Russia Today. The bizarre switcheroo happened around 2:30pm when Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters was speaking about the SEC and had mentioned Donald Trump and Russia repeatedly, Politico reports. In video of the switch, Waters is abruptly replaced by a live RT feed for about 10 minutes. C-SPAN says that since RT is one of the networks that it monitors, they believe this was nothing more sinister than "an internal routing issue." In a statement, C-SPAN said it does not believe it was hacked, but that it takes "network security very seriously and will continue with a deeper investigation, which may take some time." Waters tells the New York Times that she finds the incident very strange. "At a time when our intelligence agencies are very confident and basically have confirmed that Russia hacked the DNC and other political interests, and then we have, while I'm on the floor of the House, talking about Trump and Russia, I get interfered with and interrupted by Russia Today," she says. (In September, Trump was criticized for speaking to RT about the election.)