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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."