Pagination cursor for /alerts endpoint returns empty result set

[carstenpiepel]

Hello, Everyone:

I noticed that the pagination cursor provided as an output of the /alerts endpoint sometimes returns an empty result set. Here is an example from yesterday:

https://api.weather.gov/alerts?limit=5&cursor=eyJ0IjoxNzQwNTQ0OTIwLCJpIjoidXJuOm9pZDoyLjQ5LjAuMS44NDAuMC40NTZkODMxMTY1YTU2OGQ2ZDg1YWQ4ZDEzYTQ4M2FmZTA0ZTFkNGY5LjAwNy4xIn0%3D

It simply returns an empty feature collection, which is not expected:

{

  "@context": {
    "@version": "1.1"
  },
  "type": "FeatureCollection",
  "features": [],
  "title": "Watches, warnings, and advisories",
  "updated": "2025-02-26T14:26:31+00:00"
}

Small limits, such as 5 or 10, make this behavior easy to observe. After a few iterations of paging through the available alerts, the API web service reliably returns an empty result set.

I am confident that the cursor has not yet reached the end of the available results. That is not how pagination appears to work with the API. The last results page includes a cursor that returns to the beginning of the results.

I wonder if it has something to do with caching, where cache invalidation also invalidates all pagination cursors, but that's just a guess. I'd like to understand whether what I am seeing is expected behavior or not, please.