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Comment by oasisbob | Hacker News Reader

Since the danger seems to be receding -- I hope NWS & related agencies can use this as a good drill to fix their web properties.

Tsunami.gov couldn't handle the load, and many other official links (like mobile.weather.gov) just dump you into a government shutdown notice. Cell.weather.gov isn't even resolving.

I'm sure someone thought the critical products would still be easily available even with a government shutdown, it sure didn't work out that way.

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Most of the labor contracts (not to mention ADA litigation) for the government require a certain level of service if the property is in use. With the government shut down that's not the case. It's the same reason for the infamous "this website is only available from ~9am to ~5pm" nonsense you can find on certain Social Security/IRS pages.

Those are probably not essential as far as the shutdown is concerned. Even NTSB investigations aren’t—there was a train crash or something during the 2013 shutdown that wasn’t investigated.

Are you sure about that? Is that the Chicago crash your talking about? The reports I was able to find indicate that the investigation did proceed but there was limited communication to the public about it because the office was closed.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov provides immediate details on earthquake activity and is my go to whenever there is an earthquake.

Why would a website go down during a government shutdown? It actually takes more work to turn it off, doesn't it?

A website can go down due to heavy load on the server/a spike in traffic.

If there's no appropriation to pay for say, hosting or electricity, you have to shut it off.

Quite honestly these agencies use it as an example of the value they provide by shutting down unnecessarily. I don’t really blame them though.

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