PHL weather, disaster management sites inaccessible

With less than 24 hours before Typhoon Haiyan's expected entry into the Philippine area of responsibility, government sites monitoring weather and disaster management were inaccessible to netizens early Wednesday.

As of 7 a.m., the sites of the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration and National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council appeared offline.

Visitors to the site would get an error message that the PAGASA (www.pagasa.dost.gov.ph) and NDRRMC (www.ndrrmc.gov.ph) could not be found.

Inaccessible as well as of early Wednesday were the sites of the Department of Science and Technology (www.dost.gov.ph) and one of its agencies, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (www.phivolcs.dost.gov.ph).

PAGASA, however, still updates its Facebook page (www.facebook.com/pagasa.dost.gov.ph) and Twitter account (@dost_pagasa).

There was no immediate explanation for the outage. The sites had been intermittently inaccessible since at least Tuesday.

Earlier, PAGASA forecaster Manny Mendoza said in an interview on dzBB radio that Typhoon Haiyan had accelerated and could enter the Philippine area of responsibility as early as midnight Wednesday. — LBG, GMA News