The National Weather Service says there is no nationwide radar outage, after false reports about its radar network spread online on Friday. The agency said its radars are operating normally and that radar.weather.gov, its public radar site, is fully working. The claims spread on the same day that a real outage at the Federal Aviation Administration halted flights across the country, and the timing made the false radar reports easy to believe.
What the Weather Service said
The National Weather Service pushed back on the reports on Friday, saying its radar system was operating normally. In a message posted online, the service said that, in case anyone had heard otherwise, there is no radar outage and radar.weather.gov is fully operational. The agency said outdated information from isolated webpages had been circulating, and it stressed that its radars were operating normally.
The statement came after screenshots and social media posts claimed that the country’s weather radar network had gone down. Some of those posts pointed to pages on the Weather Service’s own website that appeared to warn of a national radar or communications problem. The service said the pages people were sharing contained outdated information, and it did not give details about where that content came from or how it had ended up in circulation.
How the false reports spread
The confusion spread quickly, in part because Friday was already a chaotic day for anyone following travel or weather news. The FAA’s ground stop was real: the agency had halted departing flights across the country after a failure in its radar and communications systems, and thousands of flights were canceled. Against that background, a claim that the Weather Service’s radars had also failed was easy to believe and easy to share.
Local newsrooms began checking with their nearby Weather Service offices. The National Weather Service office in Jacksonville told News4JAX that everything was operating normally, and the service’s national statement said the same. The episode is a reminder of how quickly an old screenshot or an out-of-date status page can turn into a nationwide rumor, especially on a day when a genuine outage is already in the news.
What we know
Here is what is confirmed. The National Weather Service says there is no nationwide radar outage, and its radars are operating normally. The radar.weather.gov website is fully operational. The outdated pages that circulated online did not reflect the current state of the radar network, and the service said the information in them was old. The agency has not explained where the outdated content came from or why it was visible.
It is also clear that the FAA’s ground stop and the radar rumor are two separate stories. The ground stop was caused by a failure in the FAA’s own air traffic control systems, which the Transportation Secretary blamed on aging equipment and overloaded routers. The Weather Service’s radar network is a different system, run by a different agency, and it kept working through the day.
What happens next
The Weather Service has not said whether it will change how it displays status information on its website, and it has not explained how the outdated pages came to be shared. For now, the agency’s message is simple: the radar network is working, and radar.weather.gov is the place to check.
Anyone who sees a claim that the nation’s weather radars have failed should check the Weather Service’s own channels before sharing it, and should be wary of screenshots that carry no date or source. Friday’s mix-up is a useful reminder that a rumor and a real outage can look identical in a feed, and that the fastest way to tell them apart is to check the source.
Sources
Sources: CBS12 (WPEC) and News4JAX (WJXT). Featured image: A white spherical radar dome on a forested mountain top. Photo by K, Pexels License, via Pexels.