Russia-owned cable channel RT America ominously takes over C-SPAN feed for ten minutes

Here's the moment Russia Today took over the C-SPAN1 feed. Unclear what happened. RT aired for about ten minutes before C-SPAN1 came back. pic.twitter.com/mhWVgCoFxF

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) January 12, 2017

Other Twitter users joined in to say that they, too, had witnessed the takeover, and C-SPAN put out a statement confirming it, with the assumption that the problem was internal and technical:

CSPAN says it "was briefly interrupted by RT programming" today. Assuming was "an internal routing issue." h/t @DaviSusan pic.twitter.com/AoXQqzC6db

— Domenico Montanaro (@DomenicoNPR) January 12, 2017

It is possible that this was simply a technical routing glitch. If it was not a glitch but a deliberate act, it would be, as my colleague Melissa McEwan observed, a “warning shot over the bow” by Russian hackers, whose intrusion into a public service broadcast would be “a message about their ability to infiltrate the government. This wasn’t CNN’s feed that was interrupted; it was C-SPAN.”

In any case, we are not likely to know the answer anytime soon. If this was, indeed, the result of a hack by a foreign government, C-SPAN certainly will not be at liberty to say so immediately.

If it turns out to have been an innocent mistake, however, it is still a stark and disturbing reminder of where America finds itself these days: We are about to inaugurate a president who is so badly and obviously compromised in his relationship to Russia that an incident like this is immediately suspect as a possibly intentional reminder of an antagonistic foreign country’s intentions to disrupt our public institutions.