First: how much is affected?
The answer splits the problem in half. One broken widget is almost always that gauge or that embed; every widget broken at once is the data source, the script, or the page.
One widget is not showing data
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Check the gauge itself is reporting
This is the most common answer by a distance. Gauges are pulled for the winter, taken down for maintenance, and knocked out by high water. Open the station page for that gauge on the USGS site — if it has no recent reading there, it has none to give us either.
The card will say “This gauge is not reporting right now” or “Delayed” when this is what is happening.
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Check the reading you asked for exists
Not every gauge measures everything. Many report gauge height but not streamflow, and only about one in six carries a thermometer. If you asked for a reading the gauge does not publish, that field is simply absent. Rebuild the embed and the builder will warn you if this is the case.
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Rebuild the embed and re-paste it
Quickest way to rule out a mangled snippet. Page builders occasionally strip attributes or rewrite quotes. Build it again, paste over the old one, and reload the live page — not the editor preview, which often blocks scripts.
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Still broken? Look at the console
Open your browser’s developer tools (F12, or right-click → Inspect → Console), reload the page, and search the console for River Widget. Everything the widget says is prefixed that way, so it is the only thing you will find.
Then paste this in and press enter for a full report:
RiverWidget.diagnose()Send both to whoever maintains the site.
Every widget is blank
Start by testing USGS directly
The widget reads the U.S. Geological Survey from your browser, so if USGS is having trouble every widget everywhere goes quiet at once. This makes one live request to a gauge on the Madison River in Montana, only when you press it.
If the test passed, USGS is fine — check the page
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Did the script survive your CMS?
View the page source and look for
widget.js. Some platforms strip<script>tags out of user HTML without saying so. If it is missing, switch to the iframe embed, which needs no script. -
Is something blocking the request?
A content security policy, an ad blocker, or a corporate network filter can block the call to USGS. The console will say so — search it for River Widget. Try the page in a private window with extensions disabled to rule the browser out.
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Get a full report
RiverWidget.diagnose()Paste that into the console and send the output on. It lists the version, every embed found on the page, what each asked for, and the recent errors.
If the test failed, it is USGS, not you
There is nothing to fix on your side. Widgets fall back to a cached copy of recent readings where they can, and return to live data on their own once USGS is back. Check waterdata.usgs.gov — if that is also down, it is confirmed.
Still stuck
If your developer has the console output and cannot place it, report it. The support repository is where bugs, questions and feature requests are collected — it holds no code, only the issue tracker, release notes and reporting instructions.
Include the page URL, what you expected, what you saw, and the
RiverWidget.diagnose() output. That is usually enough to answer it without
a back-and-forth.