There was a rather large METAR data outage last night due to issues at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA collects the airport weather station data (in METAR format) and disseminates it to the National Weather Service, from whom the IEM collects the data from. It is doubtful that I'll be able to repair the hole in the archive from this outage.

The outage lasted from just before midnight this morning to about 5:30 AM. Here's a plot from my monitoring showing global METAR station counts with the number of stations reporting within the past hour plotted.