Posts going around on X Friday afternoon said the National Weather Service had a “nationwide radar outage,” right on top of the FAA ground stop. We checked. There was a real NWS outage, but the official wording is narrower than the rumor.
What the NWS actually said
The Weather Service posted a notice on its website, quoted by KESQ and News 9 in Oklahoma City:
“The NWS has been experiencing nation-wide internet and communications issues. You may not be able to access products on our webpages, or these products will be old.”
It added that “Technicians are actively working to resolve these issues as soon as possible,” per News 9. The NWS had also acknowledged an outage on its online radar site, radar.weather.gov, and pointed people to its official social media accounts for updates. It didn’t give a timeline for a fix.
So the confirmed problem is internet and communications, and what people saw was a radar website that wouldn’t load or showed stale images. Neither outlet reported that the radars themselves stopped working, and the NWS notice doesn’t say that either.
Forecasting didn’t stop. Local offices, including Los Angeles/Oxnard, kept issuing watches, warnings and forecasts, which stayed available through some outside websites, according to KESQ.
What we saw when we checked
At 4:48 p.m. Central, weather.gov and radar.weather.gov were both loading for us. The NWS data API was answering too. It listed 486 active alerts nationwide, and the Oklahoma City radar (KTLX) showed data received seconds earlier.
That’s a single check from our end. It doesn’t tell you how long the outage ran or whether everyone can get in, and the NWS hadn’t said it was fixed when we looked. It does suggest the radar network kept collecting data while the public sites had trouble.
Is it connected to the FAA ground stop?
Nobody has said so. Both outlets say there’s no confirmed connection. The timing is what’s driving the speculation. KESQ’s story went up at 2:36 p.m. Pacific, and the FAA’s advisory put its ground stop in effect at 2:54 p.m. Central, according to News 9.
Both agencies are describing their problems as communications failures, and that’s about all they have in common on the record so far. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said earlier there was “no indication, as of yet,” of a “nefarious act” behind the FAA outage. We haven’t seen any official comment tying the two together, and we won’t guess at one.
If you need weather information right now
- If an NWS page looks stale, check the timestamp on the image or product before you trust it. The NWS warned products “will be old” during the outage.
- Keep emergency alerts turned on in your phone’s settings. They’re a separate path from the website.
- Local TV meteorologists and your area’s NWS office accounts on social media are the backup the Weather Service itself is pointing to.
We’ll update this if the NWS says what failed or confirms a link to the FAA problem.
Sources: KESQ and News 9, plus our own check of weather.gov, radar.weather.gov and api.weather.gov at 4:48 p.m. Central.