Weather Service internet systems crumbling
Key platforms are being taxed, failing
The National Weather Service experienced a major, systemwide internet failure Tuesday morning, making its forecasts and warnings inaccessible to the public and limiting the data available to its meteorologists.
The outage highlights systemic, long-standing issues with its information technology infrastructure, which the agency has struggled to address as demands for its services have only increased.
In addition to Tuesday morning’s outage, the Weather Service has encountered numerous, repeated problems with its internet services in recent months, including:
• A bandwidth shortage that forced it to propose and implement limits to the amount of data its customers can download;
• The launch of a radar website that functioned inadequately and enraged users;
• A flood at its data cen
ter in Silver Spring, Md., that has stripped access to key ocean buoy observations; and,
• Multiple outages to NWS Chat, its program for conveying critical information to broadcasters and emergency managers, relied upon during severe weather events.
Problems with the stability and reliability of the Weather Service’s information dissemination infrastructure date back to at least 2013, when The Washington Post began reporting on the issue.
The Weather Service is working to evaluate and implement solutions to these problems, which are affecting its ability to fulfill its mission of protecting life and property.
Tuesday morning’s outage meant the Weather Service’s flagship website, weather.gov, was down, cutting off access to its forecasts and warnings.
“There is a major, national outage impacting the distribution of NWS products,” tweeted the Weather Service’s Weather Prediction in College Park, Md.
The Weather Service’s central operations center issued a bulletin at 5:11 a.m. highlighting failures nationwide, which included its forecast offices losing contact with the agency’s networks “impacting product dissemination and data reception,” inoperable websites and no access to NWS Chat.
The lack of data limited what model data and observations Weather Service meteorologists could use to make forecasts.
Meteorologists and Weather Service constituents took to Twitter to complain about the outage, many noting the chronic issues with its internet services.
“Why do things like this keep happening? It’s inexcusable at this point. The folks at NWS are constantly dealing with IT hurdles to get their message out in recent months. The frequency and complications are about the absolute worst I’ve seen,” tweeted Matt Lanza, a Houston-based meteorologist in the energy industry.
“There are absolutely no words appropriate for twitter that can describe how maddening it is that in the year 2021, the richest and most powerful government on Earth cannot get lifesaving weather forecasting information to its citizens because of an internal internet outage,” tweeted Jack Sillin, a meteorology student at Cornell University.
“The perpetual tech issues that NWS has to deal with are completely unacceptable. The response capabilities of the entire country are undermined when this happens,” tweeted Samantha Montano, a disaster specialist.
“The @NWS outages are just part and parcel of our country’s massive infrastructure problems. It’s hard to imagine meaningful climate resilience without addressing our literally crumbling bridges, broken roads, and 1995 data services,” tweeted Kathie Dello, the state climatologist for North Carolina.
“A seven hour outage of the NWS heading into the peak of severe weather season ..... so lucky that it was an extremely quiet evening. Fiber cut or not, this is not the beginning or end of IT issues in the NWS. I’d demand congressional investigation into this before the pimple pops,” tweeted Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University.