NOAA research websites slated to go dark get a reprieve

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Axios

Updated 2 hours ago


NOAA has averted the early cancellation of an Amazon Web Services contract that would have caused a slew of agency websites to go dark beginning at midnight, the agency said Friday.

Why it matters: The outages mainly would have affected NOAA's research division, and would have made numerous websites and data sets inaccessible to the public, sources who spoke on condition of anonymity told Axios.

Zoom in: Instead of ending at midnight, the contract will now expire on July 31, allowing the agency more time to figure out a different cloud-computing solution.

"There will be no interruption in service. All NOAA Research sites will remain online," a NOAA spokesperson told Axios Friday afternoon.

A social media outcry presented headwinds to the proposed sudden change.

Among those protesting was NBC "Today" host Al Roker, who tweeted to his more than 2 million followers: "This is bonkers!! These are the real world impacts of Federal government cuNOAA has averted the early cancellation of an Amazon Web Services contract that would have caused a slew of agency websites to go dark beginning at midnight, the agency said Friday.

Driving the news: The Commerce Department is requiring NOAA — and possibly all department agencies — to cut its IT budget by 50% across the board.

This is resulting in cloud services contracts being cut — and, potentially more significantly, agency networks that transmit weather and climate information.

Some of the websites that were slated to go down included the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), the Climate Program Office, the home website of NOAA research and the Earth Prediction Innovation Center, which maintains a cloud-based weather forecasting system developed as a public-private partnership.

An NSSL outage may have affected some programs, such as the Hazardous Weather Testbed, that the National Weather Service uses for severe weather forecasting.

Read more: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/04/noaa-research-websites-go-dark-saturday-night

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A number of agencies use AWS to host their sites so what they are forcing them to do is a nightmare - and only having 4 months to do it. It can often take upwards of a year to go through the RFI/RFQ and bid processes for a service like that.