good day. i m chris jansing live at msnbc head quarters in new york city. if you re watching this from an airplane gate, you already know the headline. more than 8500 flights delayed or cancelled after a key system went down. your flight was supposed to leave at 9:30 this morning? yeah. what time are you going to get to leave? 5:00 p.m. wow. so what are you going to do? just wait. how much more do passengers have to take before something is done to fix the airline system? plus house republicans are staing the first battles of what looks to be an all out political war over the next two years. votes on abortion rights, immigration and the irs are expect anded soon. is it just for show? and somehow the catastrophic situation in continueses to get even worse. relentless rainstorms have led to the deaths of 17 people. hundreds of homes have been damaged. some ripped right off their foundations. i ll speak live to the local sheriff about how they are coping, even
this which they couldn t get the backup system operating. it could be user error or prauter error or maybe a hack. we just don t know a at this time. how vulnerable, though, are we to these kinds of problems? from your point of view? well, all systems in the united states government are vulnerable to cyber attacks. the faa has been working hard to take care of that. the inspector general s office constantly audits them and shows them deficiencies and how they can strengthen their cybersecurity. so they are doing the best they can. we live in a world with a lot of airplane flights and a lot of of sophistication it s a constant challenge for all agencies to keep up with the cyber threat. so as we have been saying, this is nothing new, sadly, to fliers. christmas was a disaster for a lot of people.