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

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."

Comments

Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop

[mmell]

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?

So what's the problem?

[Black Parrot]

Don't most people consider weather forecasts "fake news" anyway?

Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peo

[Mashiki]

Where do you get your news, infowars.com?

Funny you say that. While infowars wasn't reporting on it(until yesterdayish), sites like breitbart and very small media outlets were reporting about the dam being highly stressed and having a high chance of failure. This 3 days(you can find local CBS and Fox news stations having multiple articles on it) before the big media outlets were, and it was one of the top stories on /r/conspiracy on the 10th and 11 and how the MSM wasn't reporting on it at all. That the dam was over capacity and the chances of it failing were increasing by the hour. Lot of people were also left wondering why the media and officials dealing with the dam were saying "don't worry, everything is fine" at 12pm yesterday then suddenly issuing emergency statements at 5pm on the same day and evacuation orders and people "really needed to leave now." That was when the dam was overflowing on the emergency spillway already, and the primary spillway already had a gaping hole in it and the lake level was going up by 2ft/hr.

That of course meant the highways were suddenly packed with people trying to get out of the evacuation zones. Instead of say starting voluntary evacuations on the 10th, and then staggered evacuations on the 11th. It's not out of the danger zone by any stretch right now. There's no way they're going to lower the water level by 50ft by today/tomorrow and depending on how the incoming storm tracks they could see another 2-4' water rise. The entire thing reeks of either political individuals leaning on the team overseeing the dam because they didn't want to create a panic. Or a level of incompetence so staggering that it wasn't until a bunch of engineers marched up and said: "If you don't order evacuations, we'll go to the press right now."

Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop

[tal_mud]

The neat thing about telling people about the 'Dunning-Krugar Effect' is its self feedback. A "low ability" individual thinks that he is "high ability". He is then sent to the Wikipedia article where he reads that "high ability" individuals underestimate their competence. Since he thinks he is "high ability" he figures "Ah! I have been underestimating my competence. I am even more competent than I thought."

Lovely!

Where is the disclosure?

[Tough Love]

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?

Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but monkeys made it to space first. And they got the hairless apes to do all the hard work.