National Weather Service's Websites Fail During Tornado Outbreak

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

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. Read more...