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"UPDATE Thursday 5:59 pm ET: This story was updated to add a statement from NOAA regarding the cause of the agency's website problems.\nAs spring's first significant tornado outbreak got underway on Thursday afternoon, several key National Weather Service (NWS) websites were experiencing intermittent service.\nSee also: Spring's First Tornado Outbreak Is Underway\nMany people could not reach the website for the NWS office that is responsible for issuing tornado watches across the country, known as the Storm Prediction Center, for example.\nFor a time on Thursday afternoon, the NWS homepage was displaying neither weather watches nor warnings. Making matters worse, the directions issued to the public to get around the outages were understandable to computer science majors \u2014 and probably no one else.\n\nHaving issues w/ @NWS &amp; @NWSSPC webpages today? Open up a command prompt on your PC and type \"ipconfig /flushdns\" (without the quotes)\n\u2014 NWS Southern Region (@NWS_Southern_US) April 3, 2014\n\n\n@jimduyck yeah I'm not a Mac user but I found this page describing how to flush DNS cache on Mac http://t.co/fsASGfUxvh\n\u2014 NWS Southern Region (@NWS_Southern_US) April 3, 2014\n\nDespite the SPC and weather.gov problems, most local NWS websites were still functioning, and warnings were being issued without incident via social media, online, NOAA Weather Radio and other systems.\nAccording to NOAA spokeswoman Ciaran Clayton, the problem was related to the Domain Name System, or DNS, configuration of its websites. \"At approximately 2:00 p.m. EDT today, websites with a noaa.gov URL experienced an issue with our Domain Name System configuration. This prevented some members of the public from being able to access noaa.gov resources,\" she said in a statement to Mashable. \"At no time was information about severe weather, warnings or watches hampered, and people were still able to receive information from social media, NOAA Weather Radios, local news outlets, and other sources. NOAA fixed the issue within two hours, however some users may have still received error messages as internet service providers processed the updated records. NOAA's Office of the CIO is working to determine the root cause of the issue.\"\nThis is not the first time that the NWS has faced Internet problems on a high impact weather day, with Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog highlighting problems last year.\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.\n      window._msla=window.loadScriptAsync||function(src,id){if(document.getElementById(id))return;var js=document.createElement('script');js.id=id;js.src=src;document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0].parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);};\n_msla(\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\",\"twitter_jssdk\");"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/04/03/weather-service-websites-down/>