We now have an explanation for what happened at The Weather Channel Monday night/Tuesday morning, from this internal memo sent to TVNewser:
By now, most of you are aware that both TWCN and TWCi experienced a major interruption of service last evening and this morning. Here’s what happened: around 10:45PM, a mechanical failure caused water to short out critical electrical components within our Atlanta building (300 Interstate North Parkway). The electrical outage forced us to implement a disaster recovery plan that, fortunately, we had in place as a result of a lot of hard work and smart planning on the part of our IT, Engineering, Production, Facilities and other teams. During the overnight period, we had a combination of a looping regional graphic product (similar to DBS locals) and long form on-air. Weather.com was operational, but had no weather data populating the conditions and forecasts. At 4AM, we began production of a simplified TWCN broadcast from our Earth Station. Through the next several hours, our weather systems came up one by one, and by 10AM, we were broadcasting from our primary studios and TWCi products were functioning. Our STARs became operational through the morning and early afternoon. There were many people who worked through the night to regain our ability to operate. My natural inclination would be to identify each person individually, however, the list is very long. If you were one of these people, YOU ARE DEEPLY APPRECIATED. It is yet another example of the level of commitment, caring and professionalism of our organization. It is nothing short of amazing from my perspective. Please accept our gratitude for a job well done. We also need to thank several external vendors/partners: our electricians (Inglett and Stubbs) who did heroic work restoring our power, our security team (Allied Barton), our food service partner (Sodexho), Liebert Corporation, ALC and Ascent Media. Please join me in thanking everyone for their heroic work!