[cdfuller]

Can anybody expand on the implications of this?

Being unfamiliar with it, it's hard to tell if this is a minor blip that happens all the time, or if it's potentially a major issue that could cause cascading errors equal to the hype of Y2K.

[autarch]

Time travel is extremely dangerous right now. I highly recommend deferring time travel plans except for extreme temporal emergencies.

[fuzztester]

Same for database transaction roll back and roll forward actions.

And most enterprises, including banks, use databases.

So by bad luck, you may get a couple of transactions reversed in order of time, such as a $20 debit incorrectly happening before a $10 credit, when your bank balance was only $10 prior to both those transactions. So your balance temporarily goes negative.

Now imagine if all those amounts were ten thousand times higher ...

[verzali]

Uhh, here's the problem, I'm sort of stuck travelling into the future at a more or less constant rate. I don't know how to stop doing that...

[philistine]

Unless you want to punch a guy in the face offscreen. Then go for it.

[jeffrallen]

Would traveling to the past in order to put in place a preemptive fix for this outage be wise or dangerous?

Asking for a friend.

[yawpitch]

Define “extreme”?

[Animats]

Google has their own fleet of atomic clocks and time servers. So does AWS. So does Microsoft. So does Ubuntu. They're not going to drift enough for months to cause trouble. So the Internet can ride through this, mostly.

The main problem will be services that assume at least one of the NIST time servers is up. Somewhere, there's going to be something that won't work right when all the NIST NTP servers are down. But what?

[guenthert]

Ubuntu using atomic clocks would surprise me. Sure they could, but it's not obvious to me why they would spend $$$$ on such. More plausible to me seems that they would be using GPSDO as reference clocks (in this context, about as good as your own atomic clock), iff they were running their own time servers. Google finds only that they are using servers from the NTP Pool Project, which will be using a variety of reference clocks.

If you have information on what they actually are using internally, please share.

[genidoi]

Atomic clock non-expert here, what does having a fleet of atomic clocks entail and why would the hyperscalers bother?

[axlee]

Can't they point these dns records to working servers meanwhile to avoid degradation?

[adastra22]

I know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.

[dredmorbius]

GPS?

[jhart99]

NIST maintains several time standards. Gaithersburg MD is still up and I assume Hawaii is as well. Other than potential damage to equipment from loss of power (turbo molecular vacuum pumps and oil diffusion pumps might end up failing in interesting ways if not shut down properly) it will just take some time for the clocks to be recalibrated against the other NIST standards.

[joncrane]

Gaithersburg went down on December 8th, is there confirmation that it's fully functional again?

[franklyworks]

Time engineers are very paranoid. I expect large problems can't occur due to a single provider misbehaving.

[estimator7292]

No noteworthy impact at all. The NTP network has hundreds to thousands of redundant servers and hundreds of redundant reference clocks.

The network will route around the damage with no real effects. Maybe a few microseconds of jitter as you have to ask a more distant server for the time.

[1970-01-01]

>Can anybody expand on the implications of this?

The answer is no. Anyone claiming this will have an impact on infrastructure has no evidence backing it up. Table top exercises at best.

[ThrowawayTestr]

If your computer was using it as your time server and you didn't have alternatives configured your clock my have drifted a few seconds.

[Roark66]

I never checked it, but how much a typical's pc/server's clock does actually drift over a week or a month? I always thought it's well under a second.

[ncr100]

Songs with lyrics such as, "What time is it?" will have no clap back.

Perhaps, "We don't know." will become popular?

[meindnoch]

Unix timestamp resets to zero.

[__turbobrew__]

I always wanted to see what the 70s were like, heres to hoping it happens.

[cramcgrab]

I’d say everybody moving off NIST boulder NTP.