The National Weather Service (NWS) website was severely hobbled after an "abusing Android app" interfered with its national digital forecast system, through which tens of millions get their weather forecasts each day.

On Monday afternoon at 4:11 p.m. ET, the NWS' Telecommunications Gateway posted a status message notifying its forecast offices, which are scattered throughout the country, of the problem (like most NWS messages, this one was delivered in a SCREAMING all-caps font):

TO - ALL CUSTOMERS SUBJECT - POINT FORECAST ISSUES . WE ARE PROVIDING NOTICE TO ALL THAT NIDS HAS IDENTIFIED AN ABUSING ANDROID APP THAT IS IMPACTING FORECAST.WEATHER.GOV. WE HAVE FORCED ALL SITES TO ZONES WHILE WE WORK WITH THE DEVELOPER. AKAMAI IS BEING ENGAGED TO BLOCK THE APPLICATION. WE CONTINUE TO WORK ON THIS ISSUE AND APPRECIATE YOUR PATIENCE AS WE WORK TO RESOLVE THIS ISSUE. . NIDS - KM

The outage means that many visitors to the popular weather.gov website were prevented from clicking on a location and accessing the weather forecast for that area. As of 5:55 p.m. ET, a full hour and fifty-five minutes after the message was posted, that functionality was still not working, and there was no alternative functionality up and running in the meantime, meaning that no forecasts appeared at all.

The message says forecasts are available by zones, which is the method the agency used before it upgraded to point-and-click digital forecasts. Yet zone forecasts were not readily available via weather.gov to at least some users. It is also unclear if the outage is affecting the distribution of potentially life-saving severe weather warnings.

"We are actively working with the app developer to resolve an issue with their program which is making data requests from us too frequently," said NWS spokesman Christopher Vaccaro in an email statement to Mashable. Vaccaro did not reveal the specific app that is causing the problem or any more details.

The NWS has suffered a series of debilitating telecommunications snafus during the past two years as its infrastructure ages. In April, several important NWS websites went down during spring's first major tornado outbreak. And one month later, as an EF-3 tornado touched down near Albany, New York, NWS warnings were not disseminated through their website and other automated channels.

Radar data stopped flowing to mobile apps and NWS websites for at least a half an hour, and at least some NWS offices lost the ability to disseminate severe weather warnings through automated means, turning instead to social media.

In a post on its Facebook page on May 23, the National Weather Service forecast office in Mt. Holly, New Jersey, which covers the Philadelphia metro area, stated: "Our products are NOT being sent out at this time due to technical issue. All warnings will be sent via social media."