NOAA Weather will delete websites using Amazon, Google cloud services Saturday

Immediate concerns and uncertainty

• Commenters worry specific critical sites (e.g., Space Weather Prediction Center) might disappear, but others report no official indication yet that those particular sites are targeted.
• There is confusion about scope: some think “NOAA weather” broadly is going dark; others stress this is about research-division sites hosted on AWS/GCP/WordPress.
• It’s unclear exactly which datasets, APIs, and feeds will vanish versus remain accessible via older FTP/HTTP endpoints.

Privatization and AccuWeather narrative

• Many tie this move to a long-standing push to reduce freely available public weather information and shift value to private forecasters (often citing AccuWeather).
• The pattern described: government stops providing user-facing services, private firms step in as “heroes” selling what used to be public.
• Some emphasize this will raise overall societal costs while enriching a few companies.

Project 2025 and ideological framing

• Multiple comments quote or summarize “Project 2025” language calling for NOAA to be broken up, downsized, and its functions commercialized.
• The cuts are framed by many as part of a broader “war on science” and effort to weaken climate research and climate-change monitoring.
• A minority voice suggests it might be generalized, sloppy cost-cutting rather than deliberately targeted shutdown, but others point to explicit stated goals to dismantle NOAA.

Technical and operational issues

• Several lament NOAA’s past migration from simple, robust static/FTP sites to complex JavaScript-heavy cloud apps, arguing this made them more fragile and dependent on commercial clouds.
• Others note that large-scale scientific datasets (TBs of data) are genuinely hard to host cheaply and accessibly without something like S3.
• There is anxiety that other national labs and public-data S3 buckets could be next.

Impacts on research, open data, and the public

• Commenters stress that publicly funded research data underpins both safety (weather warnings, climate info) and private-sector innovation.
• Some predict a multi-step erosion: cut web access → claim data isn’t used → cancel research → fire researchers.
• Overall tone is alarmed and pessimistic; a few ask whether anyone has seriously checked if the contracts were wasteful, but most see this as politically motivated degradation of public services.