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US National Weather Service Suffered 'Catastrophic' Outage; Website Stopped Sending Forecasts, Warnings (miamiherald.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the technical-difficulties dept.

jo7hs2 quotes a report from Miami Herald: 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. Hickman added that another backup system known as the Emergency Managers Weather Information Network (EMWIN) was also not operating.

Slashdot reader jo7hs2 notes: "The systems are back up as of Monday evening."

8 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop by mmell · · Score: 4, Insightful
    And the dam being well over maximum capacity (so much so that there was live news footage of the emergency spillway dumping tens of thousands of gallons of water? Before you answer, you might want to check out how the emergency spillway works.

    Let me guess - the shooting incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School was filmed on the same soundstage where they faked the moon landings, right?

  2. Probably shut down by the current President. by mmell · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Can't have that kind of information just floating around where anybody can see it now, can we? I wouldn't be surprised if meteorologists at National Weather were instructed to have any information released to the public cleared by the White House first? It wouldn't do to have it known publicly what our weather is going to be tomorrow, would it?

    1. Re:Probably shut down by the current President. by RabidReindeer · · Score: 2, Insightful

      According to Rick Santorum (R, Accuweather), publicly-funded weather services should only be "switched on" when there's an emergency.

  3. Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop by Hylandr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Please Google the 'Dunning-Krugar Effect' and note that there's at least 12 years of documented history and video evidence of the weak spot in the spillway.

    There's real engineering here and there's people working today that weren't there 12 years ago that may well have not known about the issues documented prior.

    There's no conspiracy here you nutter.

    --
    ~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
  4. Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peo by mmell · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Where do you get your news, infowars.com?

  5. Where is the disclosure? by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is there any possible justification for withholding full details of the failure, in the public interest? If a bridge had collapsed instead, would it be possible to withhold details? Is it OK for this to just happen again at some random time?

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  6. Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop by Hylandr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In the situation you describe I would expect the shit-posting to intensify.

    --
    ~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
  7. Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop by tal_mud · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh, it has, it has.