The FEMA Integrated Public Alert & Warning System feed is back online.
IPAWS is the emergency warning network that uses the Internet for communicating alerts. Emergency managers use IPAWS to disseminate their alerts, including alerts for Primary Entry Point stations as part of the Emergency Alert System daisy chain.
The feed was down for a short time on Wednesday.
FEMA is investigating the cause.
At the same time, FEMA IT Operations was due to perform an upgrade to the feed.
“This deployment is one of the necessary steps to bring IPAWS to an ‘active-active’ arrangement in which two geographically separated systems will run simultaneously,” said FEMA IPAWS Engineering Chief Mark Lucero on a post to the SBE EAS List serv. “External interactions (message posts and retrievals) will be load balanced between the two sites and automatic failover capability will be implemented.”
“Thank you for your patience as we work through this deployment. We will provide more information [as] it is made available,” stated Lucero.