National Weather Service Warning System Hobbled by Outage at Worst Possible Time

As severe thunderstorms, some spawning damaging tornadoes, erupted across the country from Denver, Colorado, to Albany, New York, a widespread data outage hit the National Weather Service (NWS) on Thursday. Radar data stopped flowing to mobile apps and NWS websites for at least a half an hour, and at least some NWS offices lost the ability to disseminate severe weather warnings through any means other than social media.

In a post on its Facebook page at about 4:45 p.m. ET, the National Weather Service forecast office in Mt. Holly, New Jersey, which covers the Philadelphia metro area, stated: "Our products are NOT being sent out at this time due to technical issue. All warnings will be sent via social media." Read more...