The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory recently beganfull-scale operations, surveying 2/3 of the entire sky at very high energy(VHE; E > 100 GeV). This new view of the sky offers the opportunity to detectflares from blazars, facilitating studies of the mechanisms powering theircentral engines and providing an avenue to constrain the properties ofparticles and fields in intergalactic space. The HAWC Collaboration hasimplemented an online flare monitor to search for rapid and extreme transientactivity from a set of blazars either known or suspected to produce VHEemission. The goal of this project is to issue alerts sufficiently rapidly toform a complete multiwavelength picture of the flare. We describe the currentstatus of the online flare monitor, demonstrating its ability to detect flaresvia a study of the blazars Markarian 421 and Markarian 501 in offline data.
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