Dave and Jonathan,
The external alert system is not connecting to GraceDb. Looking back at the logs it has not been working since 28 Feb 2019. Queries to gracedb are failing with SSL errors.
In tracking this down we moved the external alerts to a new Debian 9 vm (ext-alert.cds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu) from h1fescript0. This was to put it under better configuration management and to get to a newer set of python and ssl libraries. This has not solved the problem. We are in communication with the GraceDb developers.
I heard back from the GraceDb developers.
When GraceDb moved to being hosted on AWS the load balancer that put in front of the system was changed. The new proxy could not understand impersonation proxy certificates. Simply removing a -p option in the call to ligo-proxy-init when generating the x509 certificate used to authenticate to GraceDb.