The National Weather Service (NWS) has suffered a major data outage during a time of intense weather over the past week, the agency reported Tuesday morning.
Over the weekend, millions of Americans were hit with high temperatures and regional flooding. In Iowa, GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds declared a disaster area for 21 counties in the northern region of the state. South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem also declared a state of emergency due to severe flooding.
Axios noted the telecommunications outage is part of pattern of breakdowns during critical times and prevents life-saving information from reaching those areas most affected.
"The outage has caused impacts to NWS operations, including degradation of forecast and warning dissemination, disruption of data flows, and sluggish websites," the NWS said in a statement.
"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."
AccuWeather expects the heavy rains to continue through the week as rivers across multiple states continues to flood communities.
"So much rain has fallen in a zone from southern Minnesota and southwestern Wisconsin to northeastern Nebraska, including Iowa and southeastern South Dakota, that nearly a dozen major rivers are on the rampage," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said.
James Morley III ✉
James Morley III is a writer with more than two decades of experience in entertainment, travel, technology, and science and nature.
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