alt Hacker NewsCan 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.
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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?
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.
Time engineers are very paranoid. I expect large problems can't occur due to a single provider misbehaving.
>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.
Unix timestamp resets to zero.
I’d say everybody moving off NIST boulder NTP.
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.
Time travel is extremely dangerous right now. I highly recommend deferring time travel plans except for extreme temporal emergencies.