National Weather Service Kinda, Sorta Explains Its Major Data Outage

The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a memo on Friday afternoon detailing the likely causes and lessons learned from the major computer disruption on Thursday afternoon, which knocked out the central automated system through which the agency issues life-saving severe weather warnings

The memo says the data disruption was triggered by an upgrade to the weather data dissemination system itself, specifically a modification to a network firewall. The firewall was supposed to continue to allow data to pass through it, but "within minutes, engineers noticed that data were not traversing the firewall." The memo claims all warnings did reach the public despite the loss of the main automated delivery system, which is a questionable claim considering that many storm chasers, television meteorologists, online news sites and others in the weather community reported disruptions in crucial radar data and severe weather warnings on Thursday Read more...