National Weather Service

The National Weather Service has been producing weather forecasts for the United States longer than most Americans might guess — its origins trace to a US Army Signal Corps program established in 1870, predating the Department of Commerce that now houses NOAA and NWS by several decades. Today the NWS operates 122 local forecast offices, national centers for hurricane tracking, aviation weather, and river forecasting, and the Weather Prediction Center that issues the national forecast maps familiar from television broadcasts. It is the primary source of weather data for virtually every private weather app and service in the country, making its infrastructure foundational to the entire weather information ecosystem.

The NWS digital platform includes weather.gov, the primary public-facing website with location-specific forecasts, hourly breakdowns, and radar imagery. Behind the weather.gov interface, the NWS operates data feeds that distribute raw forecast data, observation data from thousands of ASOS weather stations, and warning information to commercial partners, emergency managers, and downstream applications. The Wireless Emergency Alert system — which delivers tornado warnings and flash flood emergencies to cell phones within threatened areas — depends on NWS forecaster input to generate the alerts that reach millions of people without any app required.

When weather.gov experiences problems, users encounter map layers that fail to render, location searches that return errors, or hourly forecast tables that display stale data without indicating when they were last updated. Radar loops — among the most-visited features on the site during severe weather — can fail to animate or load individual frames, leaving a static image that gives no sense of storm motion. During severe weather events, when traffic to weather.gov spikes sharply, server load can cause significant slowdowns at exactly the moments when accurate forecast information is most urgently needed.

Outage.gg tracks National Weather Service website status using community-submitted reports from users checking forecasts, radar, and watches and warnings. If weather.gov is down, radar is not loading, or forecasts are unavailable, the live status page shows current impact from across the NWS user base.