FlagAlertThe Flag Alert Way
A half-staff alert is only worth having if it arrives. Here is how we find every order — every place we look, and what happens when one of them fails.
Wherever we show you a flag status, we also show when it was last checked. If our checks have fallen behind, that line says so instead of showing a time — a fresh-looking timestamp over a source that has stopped working is worse than no timestamp at all.
The governors themselves
Most half-staff orders reach us the same way they reach the press: we are subscribed to the official notification lists that governors' offices and state communications teams send from. When a state announces an order, the announcement arrives in our inbox and is read within minutes. This is our primary source for state orders — not a copy of somebody else's summary, but the notice the state itself sent out.
The official pages, on a schedule
Lists can be slow, and some states do not run one. So we also read the places orders are published: the Federal Register for presidential proclamations, and each state's own flag-status or newsroom page. These run automatically throughout the day, and what they find is checked against what we already hold so the same order is never counted twice.
A standing cross-check
Through the day, we read the official status page for the states that publish one and compare what it says to what we are telling customers. It is there to catch the failure that matters most — an order we never heard about — by noticing that a state says "half-staff" on a day we believe the flag is full. When the two disagree, it raises a flag for a person to look at.
A person, before anything sends
No order reaches a customer automatically. Every one is reviewed and approved by a human being first, with the source link attached, because the cost of sending a wrong order is higher than the cost of a few minutes' delay. That review is also where a local order — one that applies to a single city or county rather than a whole state — gets marked as local, so the alert says who it actually affects.
Think we have missed one?
Tell us. You do not need an account, and you do not need to be a customer. A missed order is the thing we most want to hear about, and a report goes straight to the people who can check it.
Report a missing order →Federal half-staff alerts are free, for as long as you want them. Your state's orders, SMS and calendar sync are part of a paid plan.
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