It’s been revealed that hackers recently attacked the US weather network, causing an outage of satellite feeds and several websites.

The mystery of why satellite data was temporarily unavailable through The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in October has now been discovered. What was first called “unscheduled maintenance” was, in fact, the government shutting down some of its services.

NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen made a point that the attack “did not prevent us from delivering forecasts to the public.”

Details of the attack are scarce, so it’s unclear what damage, if any, was caused by the hack.

The US military, businesses, and local governments all have a heavy dependency on reports from the US weather service, meaning that hackers managed to penetrate a vital aspect of US infrastructure.

Scientists at Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Massachusetts, were unable to send a preliminary report about weather patterns to traders and investors earlier this year.

“We were shut out entirely. That’s our one source of data,” said Rutgers climatologist David Robinson, whose global snow lab also relies on the satellite data.

This cyber attack isn’t the only attack on the United States in recent months. Just last month the White House’s unclassified network was hacked.

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