alt Hacker NewsSomewhat interesting that they themselves don't have access to the site. You'd think there would have been some disaster plans put in place?
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If access to the site is unsafe and thus the site is closed; not having access seems reasonable.
Time services are available from other locations. That's the disaster plan. I'm sure there will be some negative consequences from this downtime, especially if all the Boulder reference time sources lose power, but disaster plans mitigate negative consequences, they can't eliminate them.
Utility power fails, automatic transfer switches fail, backup generators fail, building fires happen, etc. Sometimes the system has to be shut down.
Maybe this is the disaster plan: There's not a smouldering hole where NIST's Boulder facility used to be, and it will be operational again soon enough.
There's no present need for important hard-to-replace sciencey-dudes to go into the shop (which is probably both cold, and dark, and may have other problems that make it unsafe: it's deliberately closed) to futz around with the the time machines.
We still have other NTP clocks. Spooky-accurate clocks that the public can get to, even, like just up the road at NIST in Fort Collins (where WWVB lives, and which is currently up), and in Maryland.
This is just one set.
And beyond that, we've also got clocks in GPS satellites orbiting, and a whole world of low-stratum NTP servers that distribute that time on the network. (I have one such GPS-backed NTP server on the shelf behind me; there's not much to it.)
And the orbital GPS clocks are controlled by the US Navy, not NIST.
So there's redundancy in distribution, and also control, and some of the clocks aren't even on the Earth.
Some people may be bit by this if their systems rely on only one NTP server, or only on the subset of them that are down.
And if we're following section 3.2 of RFC 8633 and using multiple diverse NTP sources for our important stuff, then this event (while certainly interesting!) is not presently an issue at all.
Step One of most disaster plans is not to create a second emergency.
The disater plan is to have a few dozens stratum 1 servers spread around the world, each connected to a distinct primary atomic clock, so that a catastrophic disaster needs to take down the global internet itself for all servers to become unreachable.
The failure of a single such server is far from a disaster.