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

National Weather Service (NWS) spokesman Christopher Vaccarro confirmed in an email to Mashable, that forecast products, including severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings, were not issued normally during the telecommunications outage. "The products that were delayed or may not have been disseminated through normal automated channels, prompted some offices to alert the public and emergency management officials through other means such as social media, email distribution lists and direct phone calls," he said.

Vaccarro said this may have been the first time that such a severe communications disruption had occurred at multiple forecast offices. "I, too, personally cannot recall this happening before," he said. "NWS management has been fully engaged on this issue — not only in identifying and resolving the issue but also in assessing the impacts experienced at local forecast offices."

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 automated means, turning instead to 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."

Considering that the typical lead time for a tornado warning is about 14 minutes nationwide, if a tornado warning was issued during the outage and not delivered to local emergency management officials and the public, it's possible that no one ever got the message before the tornado hit. Confirmed tornado touchdowns were reported near Albany, New York, with funnel clouds spotted in Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland around the time of the outage.

One thing that is clear is that weather apps were affected, as radar data stopped flowing to many of them, including RadarScope, which is widely used by storm chasers, meteorologists and pilots.

The NWS has suffered several bouts with technical problems in the past two years, but this one may have been the most consequential. In April, 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, the NWS homepage at weather.gov displayed neither watches nor warnings.