Kinetic services cars attached with sensors that will be critical for an autonomous future.
Courtesy Kinetic
Modern cars are equipped with sensors to support driver assistance systems and safety features.
Kinetic is a startup that provides sensor calibration after a car is involved in a collision.
Kinetic CEO Nikhil Naikal said his company aims to service autonomous vehicle fleets.
Human drivers aren't the only ones who need to have eyes on the road.
Many cars on the road today are equipped with at least half a dozen sensors, from cameras to radars, to support safety features and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) that are now ubiquitous in the modern automotive industry. And as automakers continue to offload the task of driving from humans, cars will become even more sensorized.
Kinetic, a Southern California-based startup, wants to scale a service that will fix those sensors if a car ever gets into a collision. The CEO analogizes it to the modern car's optometrist.
"We have eyes, and when we need to correct vision, we go to an optometrist who places all these letters at 20 feet, measures our vision and prescription, and then gives us the glasses to correct our defect," CEO Nikhil Naikal told Business Insider. "In the same way, this is a digital prescription to correct the errors of the car's understanding of the world around it."
No car is the same as it once was after its first fender bender.
Panels get bent, parts are replaced, and the paint won't match the original exactly.
The same principle goes for the sensors on a car, Naikal said. Sensors are highly sensitive to alignment, and a fraction of a degree can significantly affect the effectiveness of an ADAS or self-driving feature.
Once a vehicle is in a front-end collision or rear-ended, those sensors could be thrown out of position. Mechanics can put the sensors back in place, but they won't be re-mounted in a spot perfectly identical to their factory placement.
That's where Kinetic's robotics platform and software come in to calibrate the sensors — or, as Naikal put it, give them a "digital prescription."
The auto shop of the future
An 8,000-square-foot facility in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood is one of eight Kinetic hubs on the West Coast.
The inside is unlike loud, messy auto body shops. A Kinetic facility is quiet and mostly empty save for a rotating platform and a robotic arm attached to a short track. A typical location is staffed with up to two technicians, Naikal said.
On a Wednesday afternoon, Kinetic was servicing a 2022 Toyota Camry Hybrid LE that had been repaired at a local body shop after a front-end collision.
Kinetic uses robotics to calibrate sensors on a car, post-repair.
Lloyd Lee/BI
The car was driven onto the platform, where Kinetic's camera package takes detailed photos of the car, and a robotic arm points a laser at the radar sensor embedded in the Toyota's grill.
Kinetic's software then puts the car and the sensors back in sync.
"What the car thinks it's going to do and what the sensors think the car is going to do needs to be aligned," Naikal said. "The sensor thinks that the car is going to go right, whereas the car actually needs to go left — that's a problem. It causes unstable things like ghost braking and jerking."
The entire process takes about 10 minutes. Naikal said a single Kinetic hub can service about 80 cars a day.
Some repair shops might rely on a mobile service, in which a specialized technician comes to calibrate the sensors. Naikal said a lot of body shops don't have the space, lighting, equipment, or trained technicians that can accommodate an in-house service. Local body shops can either choose to send cars to Kinetic's hub or, if they have space, lease the company's equipment.
By the end of 2026, Naikal said he aims to have 20 hubs in the US.
Kinetic's platform can also perform damage inspections and develop repair plans, but Naikal envisions servicing autonomous vehicle fleets, which require constant cleaning and sensor maintenance, as another line of business. The future, he said, will require a new kind of service infrastructure built around robotics and software rather than a traditional body shop.
"It's going to be more than just Jiffy Lubes and Valvolines," Naikal said. "We think of ourselves as the infrastructure layer for the future of autonomy."
Alibaba.com president Kuo Zhang says AI is aiding the surge in one-person companies.
OpenClaw, an AI agent, has helped boost the trend in China.
Alibaba.com faces tariff-related challenges. Zhang says he focuses on two things to navigate them.
China has seen an explosion in "one-person companies" thanks to a little help from AI agents.
Alibaba.com president Kuo Zhang told Business Insider he has seen this growth firsthand, estimating that 30% to 40% of the e-commerce platform's customers are "solo entrepreneurs."
Business Insider previously reported on the rise of one-person companies, or OPCs, which rely on AI tools such as agents and vibe-coding technology to build their businesses without hiring other employees. Some Chinese cities are attracting these startups by offering free housing, rent-free offices, and subsidies of up to $720,000.
Zhang said AI agents have helped make these types of startups possible. He runs Alibaba.com, the Chinese cloud and retail giant's e-commerce platform that connects buyers and suppliers. While most of its customers are from China, it's also growing its customer base in the US, Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and other regions.
One-person companies face barriers to building their business. Tasks like uploading products to different sites, managing social accounts, and handling customer complaints are "easy for a big company" but harder for small businesses, Zhang said. While these tasks may not be the expertise of small businesses, they are "essential for success," he added.
Agents can help with some of that grunt work.
"Instead of taking the place of the human beings, actually, they are the employees of that solo entrepreneur," Zhang said of AI agents.
Alibaba.com recently launched Accio Work, an AI agent designed for small businesses, including one-person companies. It can help companies manage daily e-commerce operations, including customer service, tax compliance, marketing, logistics, product listings, and more.
"They are in lack of help or tax support. And now, AI is very easy to use. It's very easy to adopt and to understand everything is going to change that perspective, and we think they can benefit from them the most," Zhang said.
Alibaba.com's main Accio agent first launched in late 2024 and now has 10 million active users a month, according to the company.
China's OpenClaw craze
The rise of OPCs has been boosted by OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that has become wildly popular in China. The craze has sparked a sort of OpenClaw gold rush and spawned quirky agents for stock trading and setting up blind dates. Many OPCs have also built businesses using the OpenClaw agent.
Zhang says that the rise in OpenClaw has helped educate the market about AI agents. Alibaba itself introduced JVS Claw, a mobile app to help users install and deploy OpenClaw more easily.
Compared to China, Zhang said American users are less educated about OpenClaw and that there's a smaller scene around it. That said, OpenClaw has issues with security and return on investment, he said, adding that some customers have spent "hundreds of US dollars for tokens," and when they don't get the results they want from using agents, they quit.
Instead, it's important for agents to be user-friendly, secure, and easy for customers to get started, he said.
"If you go to SMBs, you ask about all the fancy terms about AI, like the token economy, like cloud, like open cloud, probably they've never heard about that, and what they care most is about how these tools can help me," Zhang said.
Alibaba faces changing tariff policies
Alibaba.com and businesses on the e-commerce platform face another major challenge: navigating a constantly changing tariff landscape. Zhang first became president of Alibaba.com in 2017, during President Donald Trump's first term. As policies change, Zhang said it helps to focus on two things: serving customers based on supply and demand, and technology.
"Technology changes on a daily basis, so I've learn a lot from the tech companies, and from our SMBs. They will tell us what they need and how we can leverage tech the best to help them on a daily basis," Zhang said.
"The rest, I say, is noise," he added. "Just follow all the rules, and we follow all the rules in the world."
"Informed" Polymarket users made $143 million since 2024, according to a new study.
Researchers analyzed most of Polymarket's trades between 2024 and 2026.
One co-author told BI he hoped the analysis would inform prediction-market regulation.
Last June, a new Polymarket account with the name "ricosuave666" began betting thousands of dollars on specific questions regarding Israeli military strikes on Iran.
The gamble paid off. When Israel struck Iran in the early hours of June 13, ricosuave666 pocketed roughly $155,000 before going dormant for seven months. The account resurfaced in January 2026 to place new wagers — before analysts flagged its activity and it was promptly deleted.
Ricosuave666's moves were among more than 210,000 suspicious Polymarket trades analyzed by researchers at Columbia Law School and the University of Haifa. The trades netted $143 million for the "informed" traders who made them, according to the researchers, whose findings were published this month.
The most suspicious trade made by ricosuave666 was only the 3,662nd-most unusual trade in the data, authors Joshua Mitts and Moran Ofir wrote. They said ricosuave666's gains closely matched ill-gotten gains attributed to a person charged by Israeli authorities with using military secrets to trade.
The study, which analyzed most of Polymarket's trades between 2024 and 2026, is the first to provide an estimate for the total amount won by suspicious accounts, whose activities are often flagged by market observers and traders on X and Discord chats.
The authors used five criteria relating to trade timing and amounts wagered to screen for accounts that made big, bullish bets shortly before news broke, though they acknowledged that their methods could have been over-inclusive or under-inclusive.
"We don't have any reason to think that the unobserved relationships are cutting in one way or another," Mitts, a Columbia Law School professor who has previously written about potential insider trading in equities markets, told Business Insider.
Mitts told Business Insider that he and Ofir generally used the term "informed" trading rather than "insider" trading because some of the biggest trades they flagged took place in markets where too many people influence the outcome for it to be rigged, like those related to Donald Trump's 2024 election. "Informed" is a broader term that encompasses trades made by smart bettors as well as those with unfair advantages.
The study said the election bets were included with other "anomalous" bets because the authors didn't want to be accused of massaging their methodology to get a particular outcome.
"We think there's going to be a lot of regulatory attention. We see this as just the beginning of the conversation," Mitts said.
No proof of insider trading
The authors said it's possible that they flagged profitable trades that were part of a hedging strategy and offset by a loss in another wallet controlled by the same user. Still, they characterized the volume of suspicious trades they identified as a "conservative lower-bound estimate of anomalous profits."
Harry Crane, a Rutgers statistics professor who has written about prediction markets and was not involved in the study, questioned its methodology. While the study ranked over 210,000 bets based on how unusual the bets were for the traders who made them and for the markets where they were made, the ranking of their "suspiciousness" was heavily skewed by profitability, rather than what ordinary people would consider suspicious, he told Business Insider.
"A winning bet is getting disproportionately more weight than a losing bet of the exact same type," Crane said.
Most of the 20 most suspicious trades identified in the paper, accounting for about $16 million of the $143 million in profits reaped by flagged accounts, related to the 2024 election results. Others related to Federal Reserve decisions and sports match-ups, where manipulation is theoretically possible or insider information theoretically could have leaked.
Mitts said the plan was eventually to publish all the data used for the study.
"Prediction markets have outpaced the legal frameworks designed to govern them," the authors wrote. "Our paper aims to provide the empirical grounding and legal analysis necessary to close that gap."
Polymarket changed its policy
Prediction markets have been around for decades, initially as academic experiments and later as a tool popular with members of the so-called rationalist community. The general idea is highly accurate guesses about the future can emerge from a group of non-experts who put their money where their mouths are.
Some advocates for prediction markets see insiders cashing in as a feature, not a bug. Shayne Coplan, Polymarket's founder, said last year that it's "cool" that Polymarket "creates this financial incentive to divulge information to the market."
Earlier this month, the company announced that it was banning trades by people with "stolen confidential information" and "illegal tips" as well as trades by people who can influence the outcomes of events they're betting on.
It's not clear how the company will enforce the prohibition when it doesn't know who its users are. While the company has a regulated US subsidiary, that entity processes less than 10% of the volume of trades as the offshore exchange, which doesn't collect users' names or other identifying information beyond an email address.
It didn't reply to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Kalshi announced earlier this year that it is seeking fines from two users who broke its rules, including a video editor for MrBeast who placed bets on what words would be said on shows before they were released.
Prediction markets grew slowly for years. In 2025, Kalshi grew rapidly after it began offering Americans the chance to bet on sports in a way it calls more fair than sportsbooks. Problem gambling experts are concerned that prediction markets pose similar risks to sportsbooks, however, and several states have sued Kalshi and other prediction markets, arguing that they amount to unlicensed casinos.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal regulator, fined Polymarket in 2022 and generally prevented prediction markets from offering many contracts until Trump took office last year.
Michael Selig, a Trump appointee who took the helm of the regulator last year, has been a vociferous advocate for such markets, and criticized the states for their crackdowns.
Spencer Rascoff talked "founder mode," swipe fatigue, and Gen Z dating habits with Business Insider.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
In just over a year, Spencer Rascoff has radically transformed how Tinder operates.
Rascoff changed up the org chart, pushed back on narratives of fatigue, and recentered on what Gen Z wants.
He told Business Insider about his leadership — and why a long-married man would want to run a dating company.
Spencer Rascoff met his wife before Tinder. And eHarmony. And Match.com.
He was 17 years old, attending a barbecue for students who planned to attend Harvard College. They got to Cambridge, started dating, and have been together since. His next love-match was startups, founding a slew of tech and media companies, including his opus, Zillow.
Then came Match Group, the conglomerate that owns apps like Tinder and Hinge. He knows what you're thinking: What qualifies this long-married man to know what singles want? He's never had a Tinder hookup gone wrong; he's never longed for those in Hinge's rose jail.
"I am living proof of how important it is to find the right person," he told me at Match Group's sunny West Hollywood office. "Were it not for her, it would be awful."
Rascoff thinks you can find that same life partner on his apps. The market seems to disagree, with stocks down across the category in recent years. In the post-pandemic dating app boom, Match Group's stock traded around $150; now, it hovers around $30. Five days before I spoke with Rascoff, the S&P 500 announced that it would expel Match Group.
Rascoff needs to make online dating sexy again. He's done it before — think of how stuffy the homebuying process was before Zillow. But Zillow was a disruptor, where Match Group is a legacy player. It'll take bigger swings to get more Americans swiping right.
Inside Rascoff's Tinder redesign
Rascoff doesn't come across like the stereotypical "founder mode" type. He's calm and quiet-spoken, often stopping mid-sentence to consider exactly what he wants to say.
Power centralized around Rascoff soon after he joined Match Group. He took over as CEO of Tinder from Faye Iosotaluno. Two of Match Group's longest-standing faces have also since left: Hinge founder Justin McLeod and chief operating officer Hesam Hosseini. The COO position will not be refilled.
Rascoff quickly reformed Tinder into a series of independent pods. He subscribes to Amazon's two-pizza rule: a team should never be so big that they'd need more than two pizzas. He also made the company flatter. It put Tinder in line with how he ran Zillow and how Hinge was already running, he said.
"Tinder product and engineering used to be a very large, monolithic organization where the priorities of what gets built came from on high," he said. The org chart change "unleashed an enormous amount of innovation that was buried."
He also drilled into the app's mission statement: "Tinder is the most fun way to spark something new with someone new." The team now says it in unison before every company meeting, something Rascoff said he values, even if it can be "awkward" and "creepy."
Spencer Rascoff led the keynote at Tinder Sparks.
Henry Chandonnet/Business Insider
Multiple Tinder leaders told me that the dating app now runs more like a startup. (Two leaders directly used the term "founder mode.") It's an ironic twist, given that Tinder itself was born in a conglomerate: IAC's Hatch Labs. But Rascoff seems bent on ripping up any remnants of bureaucracy.
Right before the team went on stage at the Tinder Sparks conference, Rascoff approached Claire Watanabe, Tinder's vice president of product. He was using the new Music Mode, and wanted to know why he couldn't hear it on his profile, she said.
"He's into the details," Watanabe said. "He has an opinion."
Navigating a sour dating app market
Rascoff and I mostly abstained from talking about Hinge. Part of that is because of the event: We're here for Tinder Sparks, a moment when Rascoff can play Steve Jobs to talk about a litany of new features.
Hinge is "on a path to be a billion-dollar business," Rascoff said. "The way they've done that is by knowing whom they're building for, and by bringing consumer insights into what they're building."
Tinder, on the other hand, has slumped. Its annual downloads have been shrinking since 2023, according to Appfigures. In 2021, 61 million people downloaded Tinder, the firm found. In 2025, that figure dropped to 48 million downloaders. Meanwhile, Appfigures found that Hinge was consistently showing positive growth in annual downloads.
Make no mistake: Hinge maintains a fraction of Tinder's user base, and Tinder is still the biggest dating app in the world. But the warning signs are certainly flashing as red as a Tinder flame.
The Tinder Sparks event was a moment to turn it all around. Rascoff spoke confidently on stage, looking casual in his blue jeans, and outlined a vision for the future of dating. We sipped oat milk lattes and smiled for the photo booth. It's hard not to be excited about an app when it's named in a Bad Bunny song.
The Tinder Sparks event included product announcements, specialty juices, and a bracelet-making bar.
Henry Chandonnet/Business Insider
The room's optimism didn't seem to match Tinder's perception in the outside world, where we hear constantly about "swipe fatigue" and the decline of online dating. Women especially report low-quality matches; a 2022 Pew study found that more women reported negative than positive online dating experiences.
When I asked Rascoff about fatigue, he chose his words carefully. "Some people have left the category because they find dating apps tedious," he said. His goal is to introduce "fun" features to combat that feeling.
M Science research analyst Chandler Willison said that some investors have begun to think that those worries — about "systemic issues" and "industry-wide malaise" — weren't as unchangeable as they once believed.
"Spencer has done a really good job pushing back against that idea," Willison said.
A new generation of daters
Rascoff may be married, but he's still swiping.
He excitedly showed me his phone. His Tinder profile had a photo of him, his wife, and his dogs. His bio says that he's "just here for research about our product."
It's not his first go-around on the apps. A few years after his father died, Rascoff's mother got on the apps. He served as his mother's "dating copilot," helping her improve her profile and respond to messages.
For Tinder to bounce back, he'll have to aim his dating advice down a generation. Rascoff talks about Gen Z constantly. He went directly from Match Group's Gen Z employee resource group to our interview, he said. He cracks jokes about Gen Zers who bring up astrology in their job interviews, and shows off a Rubik's Cube with Tinder's imaginary Gen Z customers.
Tinder imagines Gen Z daters like "TK" and "TK"
Henry Chandonnet/Business Insider
Match Group isn't the first company to prioritize Gen Z. It's why Nespresso brought in Dua Lipa, and why the Duolingo owl raved to "brat." For Match Group, though, the generation is life-or-death. You might still need espresso or a language app when you're 45 and happily married, but you won't need Tinder.
I'm a Gen Zer myself, a 23-year-old Tinder swiper. It was an odd experience to sit in the Tinder Sparks auditorium and be told by older generations how I want to date. I want to be "perceived authentically," they said. I'm interested in "self-development," they said.
During our interview, Rascoff reminded me that Gen Z wants "lower pressure" ways to date. That's why they pivoted to in-person events; because they're chill, and because they're "meeting Gen Z users where they are."
The low-pressure model made sense. I'm not dating for marriage; I just want to have a good time. But why, then, are all my friends on Hinge, the higher-pressure alternative? (Hinge lets you like fewer people, and doesn't provide the anonymity of a two-way match.) I could name at least four Gen Z couples in my life who met on the app designed to be deleted.
For a while, all I heard about Tinder was that it was an endless hole of one-night stands. Then, I met up with a friend, who told me that she'd started dating. She let me in on a secret: it wasn't Hinge she was using, but Tinder. It was easier, she said.
There's little real data to back up a Tinder turnaround yet. Monthly downloads remain at about 3.9 million and haven't started climbing, per Appfigures. Willison said that Tinder was still in a "recovery" phase. But my friend's confession felt like a sign. People can (and do) still find sparks on the app.
Rascoff said he thinks he'd do well on Tinder. Those who are authentic and put in the hours find their spark, he said. "If I were single, I would certainly do that."
Tech investor Ron Conway, seen here in 2013, is hoping that California Gov. Gavin Newsom helps kill a proposed wealth tax before it reaches voters.
Jeff Chiu/AP
Tech investor Ron Conway is worried that California's proposed wealth tax could pass.
He and several other big names in tech are funding campaigns to stop the proposed ballot initiative.
Conway said it's imperative that the proposed tax never reach the ballot.
Famed Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway says he wants to kill California's proposed wealth tax now.
"Our job is to get Gavin to negotiate this so that it doesn't get to the ballot. So, maybe they don't get the signatures," Conway told Jack Altman during an episode of Altman's "Untapped" podcast that was posted on Wednesday.
Conway, the founder of SV Angel and known as "The Godfather of Silicon Valley," said that if the proposed wealth tax reaches the ballot, it "could" pass.
A recent UC Berkeley Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research-Politico poll found that support was hovering around 50%, within the margin of error of potential failure, though it is still very early in the process.
Major names like Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have already rushed to move assets out of California, the state home to the most billionaires. If passed, California residents with a net worth of over $1.1 billion would face a one-time tax totalling 5% of their assets. Supporters of the initiative are still gathering signatures ahead of a June deadline.
Conway said Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is publicly opposed to the wealth tax initiative, is aligned with the efforts. Conway said one way to give Newsom bargaining power is by supporting the three competing ballot initiatives, which would effectively neuter the proposed wealth tax.
Brin, Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and others have poured over $44 million into "Building a Better California," a political action committee that is pushing the three competing anti-wealth tax ballot measures. In November, Conway donated $100,000 to "Stop the Squeeze," another group that is opposed to the proposed tax.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen once called Conway "the human router," a nickname he told Altman that he considers a compliment. Conway has been a fixture in tech for decades, making early bets on Google, Facebook, and other companies. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Jack's brother, credited Conway with helping him hold OpenAI together during his brief ouster in 2023.
Conway also told Jack Altman that their interview could not run late, because that night he had courtside seats at the Golden State Warriors game next to House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul.
"We must keep this off the ballot," Conway said. "So a whole bunch of work has to happen for that."
Snaking TSA lines in some airports, no queues in other — getting through security is a game of chance now.
Michael M. Santiago; RONALDO SCHEMIDT / Getty Images
Getting through airport security in the US is like playing roulette right now.
Some travelers are missing flights after hours in line, and having to spend the night in the airport.
Others are budgeting hours for TSA chaos — and then sailing through the line in minutes.
Bazela Malik was in New York City to celebrate Eid with her family. Her journey back to Fort Lauderdale turned into a more than 24-hour ordeal, involving two missed flights, several Ubers, a walk in the rain, and a sleepless night.
She is one of millions of people who have endured nightmare travel days as the partial government shutdown has thrown US air travel into chaos.
But not all chaos is created equal — and more than a month after TSA agents started calling out of work due to missed paychecks, disrupting the flow of travelers through airports, passengers are playing an unwelcome game of roulette.
Some are arriving at the airport hours early, only to find minimal delays and to breeze through security. Others are waiting for hours in snaking queues only to miss their flights.
One of the problems at play is that it's been nearly impossible to predict which airports will have long lines, and when. TSA callouts at some major airports have been as high as 40%, resulting in major disruption; Atlanta and Houston George Bush airports have both warned of 4-hour delays for days. Other airports, meanwhile, have been able to keep operations running more smoothly — Las Vegas Harry Reid Airport, for instance, has seen minimal lines.
As a result, many travelers don't know how early to show up at the airport. Further complicating matters, hubs like JFK, Newark, and Atlanta have suspended real-time TSA wait-time tracking on their sites. The My TSA app, while spiking in downloads, is not fully functional during the partial government shutdown.
"The uncertainty and lack of reliable information" was the "worst part of the experience," Cora Bravo, a journalist who flew from New York to Mexico City on Tuesday, told Business Insider.
"The official wait times didn't match reality, and people in line didn't really know what was happening or how long it would take."
Chaos in the TSA line — sometimes
Malik's nightmare trip began when she missed her JetBlue flight from LaGuardia on Sunday evening because she was stuck in a three-hour security line. Her next flight, around 6 a.m. on Monday, was canceled because of the Air Canada plane crash that led to LaGuardia being shut down.
Unable to get a taxi at LaGuardia, she walked in the rain to a pickup spot, caught a cab to JFK Airport, waited for six hours at the airport, and finally caught an afternoon JetBlue flight back to Fort Lauderdale, where she works as a hotel accounting manager.
"When you go on break from work, you just want to relax," she said. "But the whole experience made me feel very stressed out."
Many airports are facing staffing shortages as more Transportation Security Administration agents call out of work. While the shutdown began on February 14, the situation was exacerbated when TSA agents missed their first full paycheck earlier this month.
While Republicans want billions more in funding for the Department of Homeland Security, Democrats want to see reforms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, following January's violence in Minnesota.
Friday is a key deadline. Not only does it mark another missed paycheck for TSA staff, but it's also the last day Congress is scheduled to be in session before a two-week break.
'The line was eating itself'
For New York-based advertising copywriter Megan Walsh, the TSA chaos came at a really bad time.
Stuck in the TSA queue at LaGuardia before her flight to New Orleans for her sister's bachelorette party on March 18, she got a call from her company's HR and CEO, who informed her that she had been laid off.
"My legs were shaking because I was so scared about the call, and I couldn't get through the line in time," Walsh said, saying it was a terrible time to get the news.
Walsh was on the way to her sister's bachelorette trip in New Orleans.
Laura Rozner
The bachelorette trip was a good distraction for her, she said, but the travel chaos picked back up when it was time to head back to NYC on Sunday. Arriving at the airport more than four hours before her American Airlines flight, the staff pointed her and her friend Laura Rozner to the garage, where the queue began.
Rozner and Walsh were waiting in line for more than four hours at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport
Laura Rozner
"You know the game, 'Snake?' It was like that — the line was eating itself," she said. "We couldn't figure out where the end of the line was; there were loops and loops of people."
Rozner, a marketing manager based in NYC, said she didn't think to pack food or drinks. By the end of the four-hour wait, she was hungry and stressed. She made it to the gate 30 minutes before boarding.
Madison Terry, a small-business owner from Atlanta who was traveling to Florida with her 1-year-old twins on Delta Air Lines on Saturday, said she'd never been so anxious on a travel day.
"There were moms who had to ask people to hold their spots so they could get water for their babies, older gentlemen with canes who had to pee, a student crying because she'd missed her exam," Terry said.
Bendheim was stuck in Atlanta with her father on the way back from Colorado when their flight got canceled. They considered driving for seven hours instead, but there wer no rental cars available either.
Rebecca Bendheim
Others are cruising through airports
Some travelers managed to strike the TSA lottery.
Shayna Macklin, an NYC-based marketing director, said she arrived at JFK five hours early for her Delta Air Lines flight to Nevada because she expected to wait in line.
Macklin, who said she has TSA PreCheck Touchless ID and CLEAR, said she got through security in three minutes.
"I absolutely expected to be waiting in line for hours," she said.
"I will say that I did feel a bit uneasy, but was grateful that I had a good experience going through security and that my flight left on time," Macklin said.
Abby Cox, a teacher from Alabama, arrived seven hours before her flight from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Tuesday. While the airport warned of four-hour lines, she said she got through in under 45 minutes.
"I have a medical condition where I cannot hold my bladder, so I was very anxious about the bathroom situation," Cox said. "I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten through so quickly, and I had no problem waiting at a gate for 6 hours."
ICE agents in airports and airline CEOs losing patience
With scores of TSA agents not showing up for work, the DHS has deployed ICE agents across 14 US airports to fill some of the gaps. ICE agents aren't doing any of the TSA's key security screening work, but have been managing lines and directing passengers.
Flight attendants' unions have slammed this step. "TSA workers must be paid now," they said in a joint statement Sunday.
Airline CEOs are losing patience, too. Earlier this month, they signed a letter from the Airlines for America trade group that called on political leaders to "immediately" reach an agreement. "Then they need to act so this problem never happens again," it added.
"Once again, air travel is the political football amid another government shutdown," the letter said.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, one of the signatories, also told CBS News: "It's just ridiculous to me that it has to get bad before they can get a deal done."
