NWS Statement on Cause of Outage on Feb. 13
Feb. 14, 2017
The National Weather Service experienced a failure of its AWIPS Network Control Facility communications network at 2:08 p.m. EST Feb 13. The outage, lasting two hours, 36 minutes, prevented us from fully distributing forecasts and warnings. During the outage, the public was able to access forecasts, watches and warnings by NOAA Weather Radio and the social media accounts of their local forecast office.
Technicians quickly determined the cause of the problem was the simultaneous failure of two core communications routers - primary and backup - for the control facility due to a power problem. The routers were replaced and the system was restored to full service. We are still investigating what caused the power outage.
The AWIPS communications system is a very reliable configuration and this is the first time both routers failed simultaneously.
We are implementing additional communication pathways to the backup Network Control Facility to ensure that problems encountered in switching operations to this backup facility will not recur.
Feb. 14, 2017
The National Weather Service experienced a failure of its AWIPS Network Control Facility communications network at 2:08 p.m. EST Feb 13. The outage, lasting two hours, 36 minutes, prevented us from fully distributing forecasts and warnings. During the outage, the public was able to access forecasts, watches and warnings by NOAA Weather Radio and the social media accounts of their local forecast office.
Technicians quickly determined the cause of the problem was the simultaneous failure of two core communications routers - primary and backup - for the control facility due to a power problem. The routers were replaced and the system was restored to full service. We are still investigating what caused the power outage.
The AWIPS communications system is a very reliable configuration and this is the first time both routers failed simultaneously.
We are implementing additional communication pathways to the backup Network Control Facility to ensure that problems encountered in switching operations to this backup facility will not recur.