National Weather Service outage causes alert delays during Friday's severe storms in the Triangle

A national outage impacted how the National Weather Service (NWS) issued its emergency alerts during severe storms Friday around the Triangle.  

According to NWS messaging, the "dissemination delays" started around 2:00 p.m. Friday May 30.

“We knew it was going to be a big weather day for us,” WRAL Meteorologist Aimee Wilmoth said. “We had a Level 3 risk, which is extremely rare. We saw the radar get more active and we didn’t get any warnings.”

The NWS is in charge of declaring watches or warnings for thunderstorms, tornadoes and other weather emergencies. For our team of meteorologists, they expected them on Friday, but were puzzled why they weren’t there.

“It was a bit chaotic,” WRAL Meteorologist Kat Campbell said. “We’ve never been in this situation before. Sometimes, the NWS offices go offline, communications go down, but the protocol is that they have a different nearby office pick up issuing warnings for them. For us to have nothing coming in, we’ve never seen this situation. Mike Maze said, he has never seen that in his more than 30 years working here.”

Those alerts were not just missing news stations, they also weren’t getting pushed to smartphones across the area, possibly putting people in danger should one of the tornado watches turn to a warning or even worse.

“Seconds matter,” Campbell said. “You’ve got to warn people to seek shelter as fast as you can. In the nature of some of these more summertime storms, they po up so quickly, they move so quickly, the faster we can get information to people, the better. And we were getting it to people as fast as we could on TV.”

While the system was down, Campbell, Wilmoth and the rest of the WRAL weather team were in constant communication with the NWS.

They received screenshots of the warnings and watches the NWS was trying to send out and they were manually entering them into graphics software so it could air on TV. Maps highlighting areas were unavailable, so Campbell had to get creative.

“I have manually drawn the outline of the severe thunderstorm warning here in white so you can get an idea,” she said during the broadcast.

“It was chaotic back here,” Wilmoth said. “The viewers didn’t know much about what was happening behind the scenes but I was manually typing in the crawls that run at the bottom of the screen. We were having to physically draw the warnings on our maps. To do that in a timely manner is very challenging. So we weren’t able to be as fast as we typically are because there was so much added work behind the scenes that we had to do.”

About two hours later, the NWS posted a note saying the dissemination delays were resolved. That was at 4:24 p.m. right in the middle of WRAL News.

“The NWS is starting to se some of their products come back online, but it’s not fixed just yet,” Campbell said during the broadcast.

The issue continued throughout the night. Finally, just before 1:00 a.m. Saturday, the NWS sent a message saying, “The earlier problem with data dissemination problems have been resolved.”

The NWS was not available for an interview but provided a statement to WRAL News about the outage:

“Between 1:45pm and 3:05pm ET on May 30, the National Weather Service’s primary AWIPS Network Control Facility (ANCF) experienced degraded network speeds. The degradation impacted the ability for some weather alerts to disseminate to partners in the private sector as well as to NOAA Weather Radio. The Network Control Facility team was notified, and the issue was resolved later in the evening on May 30.”