The Grayson County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) in Texas announced that its CodeRED alert system is currently offline due to a cyber incident affecting the third-party company responsible for sending emergency notifications. Unfortunately, this significant outage arose just as severe weather is expected in the area. Because CodeRED may remain unavailable during the approaching storm system, officials urge residents to rely on weather radios as their primary backup. These all-hazards radios, especially with battery support, ensure government alerts from the National Weather Service are received even if other systems fail.

Incidents like this highlight why organizations must integrate network-to-application performance management (NPM / APM) with cybersecurity within a single, consolidated platform - such as that provided by NIKSUN. When performance and security are monitored together, teams can immediately investigate reports of slowness, outages, or service unavailability and determine whether the root cause is operational, security-related, or both. A unified platform enables rapid detection of anomalies, full-fidelity visibility into fine-grain activity, and streamlined investigation that reveals the who, what, where, when, and how of an incident. This consolidation is what allows organizations to quickly identify a cyber event affecting a mission-critical service, determine its impact on service delivery, and mitigate the issue before it disrupts essential public safety functions.