National Weather Service's Websites Fail During Tornado Outbreak

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By Andrew Freedman2014-04-03 20:52:20 UTC

As spring's first significant tornado outbreak got underway on Thursday afternoon, several key National Weather Service (NWS) websites were experiencing intermittent service.

See also: Spring's First Tornado Outbreak Is Underway

Many people could not reach the website for the NWS office that is responsible for issuing tornado watches across the country, known as the Storm Prediction Center, for example.

For a time on Thursday afternoon, the NWS homepage was displaying neither weather watches nor warnings. Making matters worse, the directions issued to the public to get around the outages were understandable to computer science majors — and probably no one else.

Despite the SPC and weather.gov problems, most local NWS websites were still functioning, and warnings were being issued without incident via social media, online, NOAA Weather Radio and other systems.

This is not the first time that the NWS has faced Internet problems on a high impact weather day, with Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog highlighting problems last year.

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Topics: Climate, national weather service, NWS Internet, severe weather, tornadoes, U.S., US & World