As dangerous weather moves across the Midwest, the National Weather Service radar system was hit with a network outage early Thursday, losing the capability to issue tornado and severe thunderstorm alerts.
The disruption lasted for more than four hours, according to Weather Service officials.
During the outages, severe weather compelled roughly 50 tornado and thunderstorm warnings across states, including Missouri, Illinois, and Kentucky, reported Daryl Herzmann, who runs the Iowa Environmental Mesonet and maintains a cache of data on Weather Service watches and warnings across the country.
This is not the first incident where network failure brought about chaos. More isolated outages occur as often as once a month, Herzmann said.
"There are little outages all the time," Herzmann continued. "Typically, they don't have this large of a blast radius, let's say. This was a big one."
Operations were operating normally as of 6:30 a.m., announced Weather Service spokeswoman Susan Buchanan after the agency shifted network services from a data center in College Park, Md., to one in Boulder, Colo. The agency is working with an information technology vendor "to identify the root cause of the outage," Buchanan said in an email.
Jacob Dickey, a meteorologist with WCIA in Illinois, said on X early Tuesday that he was receiving hand-drawn maps of tornado warning areas from the Weather Service's St. Louis office, as it was unable to send out the warnings electronically.
"Clear data issues are happening with NWS right now," he wrote.
Additionally, commenting,"Sheesh."
Buchanan also notes watches and warnings were being issued as normal Tuesday morning as more stroms and potential tornadoes moved across the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys.
Ken Graham, the Weather Service's director since June 2022, has said addressing crumbling data infrastructure is a top priority.
