Weather Service computer network goes down during Midwest flood disaster

Zoom in: According to a NWS statement, the trouble began around 5:30pm ET on Monday and had yet to be fixed by midday Tuesday.

• "The outage has caused impacts to NWS operations, including degradation of forecast and warning dissemination, disruption of data flows, and sluggish websites," the agency said in a statement to Axios.
• "NWS systems engineers worked overnight to restore some functionality — including the flow of weather forecasts and warnings — and progress continues to be made this morning. Initial investigation into the root cause uncovered a network hardware configuration issue.
• This outage occurred as heavy rains continued to fall across South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois, with record-breaking flooding and the threat of an imminent dam collapse in Mankato, Minn.

The intrigue: The agency has been plagued by telecommunications infrastructure issues in recent years, even as the technology to forecast the weather has improved significantly.

• Many have had to do with what is known as the telecommunications gateway in Maryland, which the agency describes as "The primary data communications switching system of the NWS."

• It sends data nationally and internationally.
• Problems with the gateway can prevent forecasters from accessing crucial data, slow or stall the dissemination of warnings and halt the updating of key agency websites.

Yes, but: This time, the error is a hardware issue, rather than the telecommunications gateway, said NWS spokeswoman Susan Buchanan.

• Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in particular, Congress and the Biden administration have steered millions to the agency to improve computer modeling, data gathering and other programs, yet the faults in its basic infrastructure continue to occur.