ST. LOUIS, Mo. (First Alert 4) -A cyberattack has caused a nationwide outage of the Code Red emergency notification system, leaving cities and counties across the St. Louis region unable to use the popular system to send tornado warnings and other emergency alerts directly to residents’ phones.

Code Red has been down since early November, according to Mike Thornton, Warren County Emergency Management director.

Local impact spreads across region

Eureka is one of the St. Louis area cities that rely on Code Red to alert residents about tornadoes and other emergencies. Chief Michael Werges of the Eureka Police Department said about half the city’s residents have signed up for the system.

“We’ve had the code red system for many years here, and we utilize it for several different things,” We

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