The US National Weather Service said on Friday evening, Nov. 13, that there was no radar outage, hours after a notice on its own website warned of “nation-wide internet and communications issues” and Reuters reported the problem under a nationwide-outage headline. The scare unfolded on the same afternoon the Federal Aviation Administration grounded every departing flight in the country over a separate telecommunications failure.
By Friday night, the weather agency’s message was blunt: its radars were working, its radar website was up, and the claims of a nationwide collapse were built on stale web pages. Reuters updated its own story to match, reporting that the agency “said on Friday its radars were operating normally and its radar website was fully operational.”
What the Weather Service Notice Said
Earlier on Friday, the National Weather Service posted a notice that read, according to MyNewsLA: “The NWS has been experiencing nation-wide internet and communications issues. You may not be able to access products on our webpages, or these products will be old.”
The same notice said technicians were working on the disruption. Local forecast offices, including the Los Angeles/Oxnard office, kept issuing watches, warnings and forecasts, and the agency said those products remained available through some external websites. It also pointed people to its official social media accounts for updates while its websites were affected.
That notice is what Reuters first reported. In its updated Reuters report, the wire service said the agency’s website “previously showed it was experiencing nationwide internet and communications problems that could prevent users from accessing products on its websites or cause outdated information to be displayed.”
NWS Says There Is No Radar Outage
At 6:14 p.m. on Friday, the agency posted a correction on social media. “In case you heard otherwise, there is no radar outage and radar.weather.gov is fully operational,” the NWS posted, according to News4JAX. “Outdated content from isolated webpages stating otherwise has been circulating, but NWS radars are operating normally.”
Local offices backed that up. News4JAX said the Jacksonville office told the station everything was operational and the rumor was false. AL.com reported that the Huntsville office said its radar was “operating just fine,” and that the Birmingham office relayed a fuller statement from the agency:
“For broader awareness, we are not seeing any widespread communication outages. Our monitoring indicates that NEXRAD dataflow is nominal, and all NWS sites have sent data in the last 10-15 minutes as usual. I’m also not seeing any network outages for any of our forecast offices or national centers. We are aware of comms issues at the FAA, however those have not yet affected NWS operations.”
NEXRAD is the network of Doppler weather radars the agency runs across the country. A statement that NEXRAD dataflow was “nominal,” with every site reporting within a 10-to-15-minute window, directly contradicts claims that the radar network was down.
A Regional Problem With Weather Radios
Not everything was perfect. In Charlotte, a member of the local Weather Service office confirmed to WBTV that there was a regional issue with weather radios, and said the problem was not widespread. Network engineers were troubleshooting it on Friday evening.
The same office said old social media posts were being shared that suggested a widespread radar failure or a larger national outage. “Those rumors are not true,” an official told the station.
The agency has not said what caused the original website notice, how long its web products were affected, or whether the regional weather radio problem had been fixed. No cause or restoration update had been reported as of Saturday, Nov. 14.
The FAA Ground Stop Running at the Same Time
The weather confusion spread while air travel across the US was frozen. The FAA said it issued a nationwide ground stop for all US airports “following communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers.” WBTV reported the stop was issued at around 4:11 p.m. on Friday.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reopened the airspace that night. “At 8:15 tonight, Eastern time, we’ve opened up the airspace,” Duffy said at a news briefing, according to CBS News. “Now does that mean every flight is going to fly right now? It’s going to be slow.”
Duffy blamed aging equipment. “Our routers actually got overloaded with data and … they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down,” he said. Multiple sources told CBS News earlier Friday that an update to the private communications network linking the air traffic control system caused it to reboot, leading to a crash. CBS said the network is operated by L3Harris, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was “no indication, as of yet, that this was a nefarious act against us. It was just a telecommunication outage, as of right now.”
The numbers piled up quickly. Within a short time on Friday, FlightAware listed more than 10,000 delays and over 4,000 cancellations, CBS reported. At Charlotte Douglas International Airport alone, more than 580 flights were delayed as of 6:46 p.m., according to WBTV.
Were the Two Failures Connected?
No official has linked them. The Birmingham statement relayed by AL.com said the FAA’s communications issues “have not yet affected NWS operations.” MyNewsLA and WBTV both reported it was not immediately clear whether the FAA and Weather Service problems were related, and neither agency has said whether they share any communications networks.
The day had already started badly for online services. WBTV noted that the ground stop came hours after a major Microsoft Office outage that hit users worldwide, which had largely been restored by Friday morning.
For anyone checking forecasts this weekend, the practical point from the agency’s own posts is simple: the radars were running, local offices kept issuing watches and warnings, and NWS social media accounts were the place it said to look for updates while parts of its websites were unreliable.
