The National Weather Service suffered a widespread radar and internet outage early Tuesday across the Midwest as heavy thunderstorms and tornadoes ripped across the region.
The agency said it was working to determine what caused the outage, which began just before 1 a.m. Central time, as tens of millions of people from Missouri to Arkansas were under some form of NWS severe weather advisory.
But the outage, which was resolved after several hours, is the latest example of ongoing issues critics have attributed to the nation’s aging data infrastructure that NOAA, which oversees the weather service, has been working for years to address.
The National Centers for Environmental Prediction’s operations center sent out an alert to regional offices around 1 a.m. Tuesday reporting that it was “investigating a network issue that is impacting multiple offices … more to come.”
