alt Hacker NewsGoogle 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?
Replies
genidoi • yesterday at 9:51 AM
Atomic clock non-expert here, what does having a fleet of atomic clocks entail and why would the hyperscalers bother?
➕ show 3 replies
axlee • yesterday at 1:19 PM
Can't they point these dns records to working servers meanwhile to avoid degradation?
➕ show 1 reply
adastra22 • yesterday at 9:49 AM
I know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.
➕ show 3 replies
dredmorbius • yesterday at 5:27 PM
GPS?
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.