Posted August 1, 2026


What exactly is the problem?

Some data requests to the Storm Prediction Center, the Weather Prediction Center, and the National Hurricane Center are currently being blocked.


What services are affected?

- Storm Prediction Center convective outlooks
- Storm Prediction Center mesoscale discussions
- Storm Prediction Center watches
- Weather Prediction Center excessive rainfall outlooks
- National Hurricane Center tropical cyclone forecasts
- Technical discussions

Warning data and storm reports are unaffected.


What is being done to resolve this issue?

When data requests are blocked, it is usually because a website detects malicious behavior (e.g. a distributed denial of service attack or an attempt to inject malicious code designed to crash or compromise a website). My guess is, someone used DigitalOcean (a company that provides web hosting services, which WarnUS uses) to conduct a cyberattack on NOAA's websites. This conclusion was reached based on the fact that requests originating from other computers get through without any problems, and this is not the first time a perpetrator has used DigitalOcean's services for malicious intent.

I have contacted NOAA's WebMaster, but it may take a while for this digital misunderstanding to get resolved.


Is there a way to circumvent this problem?

Yes, but the short-term fix is not simple and not recommended for general web surfing. If you access the web development tools on your web browser, you can disable a "cross-origin restriction" setting. Essentially, this is a security safeguard designed to prevent a web page from surreptitiously retrieving information from another website. Disabling this restriction will make your browser less safe, but it will reactivate the affected services.

Once cross-origin restrictions are disabled, (re)load WarnUS, and then press the ~ key 3 times. This will place WarnUS in "development mode", which will divert requests away from WarnUS's server and access the services directly. The affected services cannot be accessed while "cross-origins" are restricted, which is why they're handled by WarnUS's server. You may need to wait 5-15 minutes for the displays to update.