On a day when a blizzard is pasting Maine and Northern California faces a dire flooding threat, several of the National Weather Service’s primary systems for sending out alerts to the public have failed.
As of approximately 1:15 p.m. Eastern Time, products from the National Weather Service ceased disseminating over the Internet, including forecasts, warnings and current conditions.
The Weather Service’s public-facing website, Weather.gov, has not posted updated information since the outage began.
Ryan Hickman, chief technology officer for Allison House, a weather data provider, called the situation "catastrophic."
Hickman said two core routers for transmitting information from the Weather Service offices out to satellites, which beam the information back to public service providers, had stopped working. "There is a primary and a backup and both have failed," Hickman said.
At 1:33 p.m., the Weather Service sent out a message confirming that the core routers had gone down. "Engineers are looking for a work around," the message said. "Most data for the U.S. is affected including RADARS."
Hickman added that another backup system known as the Emergency Managers Weather Information Network (EMWIN) was also not operating.
Ryan Hanrahan, a broadcast meteorologist in Connecticut, called the data outage "an embarrassing infrastructure failure" on Twitter.
While access to Weather Service updates on the Internet was generally cut off, some service providers who obtain Weather Service information through fiber optic landlines were still receiving data. In addition, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Radio, which broadcasts forecasts and warnings, was also operating.
Weather Service offices can also manually share information through social media.
The National Weather Service said it was looking into the issue and would follow up with additional information regarding the outage “as soon as possible.” On Twitter it, it posted two messages:
1) NWS is aware of the data outage impacting customers across the nation. We will pass along more detailed information as soon as possible
2) In the meantime, please follow your local forecast office's social media accounts for updates. Find yours here: https://t.co/aitsYjLWOR
1. NWS is aware of the data outage impacting customers across the nation. We will pass along more detailed information as soon as possible.
2. In the meantime, please follow your local forecast office’s social media accounts for updates.
NOAA and the National Weather Service have a history of problems with information dissemination. As Hurricane Matthew charged toward Florida in October, a "partial service disruption" made its website unavailable for many users. It also experienced a "major network issue" in July which impeded the issuance of forecasts and warnings. In 2013, it experienced a host of systems failures.
During a media roundtable in late September, National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini said dissemination upgrades were underway and that the agency had made "a lot of progress." It completed its first phase of reconstructing and bulking up its dissemination system and, in its second phase, is working toward 99.9 percent reliability and having full backup capacity. "We’re about a year away," Uccellini said at the time.
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