ST. LOUIS — Meteorologists at 5 On Your Side were left in the dark Monday night during a critical moment.
As a storm system brought heavy rainfall, hail and even a tornado to the St. Louis region overnight, the National Weather Service's (NWS) radar went dark. Chief Meteorologist Scott Connell and Meteorologist Garry Frank were forced to track the storm's movement by lightning strikes alone late Monday into Tuesday morning.
"If you are just waking up, hearing sirens and can't see the radar....there are nationwide radar issues," Meteorologist Anthony Slaughter said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The outage didn't only affect St. Louis. Numerous areas across the country also lost their weather radars, a meteorologist at the NWS office in St. Louis told 5 On Your Side.
A service representative said they resolved the issues after four hours of maintenance, but the cause of the outage is still unknown.
"The National Weather Service experienced an intermittent network outage that impacted multiple forecast offices across the country overnight," said NWS Public Affairs Specialist and Meteorologist Mike Musher.
"During this outage, some warning services were impacted. The NWS IT team mitigated the issue by moving network services from our data center in College Park, Maryland to Boulder, Colorado and operations were back to normal as of 6:30 a.m. EDT; watches and warnings were going out. We are working with the vendor to identify the root cause of the outage."
This is a developing story. This article will be updated with the latest information as it is released.
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