NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power • Hacker News Board

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#201

Post by flaminHotSpeedo » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 2:33 AM UTC

zettabomb wrote: post #189

Lammy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the disaster plan for the disaster plan is to realize that it isn't that important at the human-level to have a clock meticulously set to correspond to other meticulously-set clocks, and that every attempt to force rigid timekeeping on humans is to try to make humans work more like machines rather than to make machines work more like humans.

Far more things rely on reliable and accurate time-keeping than just being on time to work. Timekeeping is vitally important (even if it's not readily visible) to lots of critical infrastructure worldwide.

Actually, it's really important to me to have a network of atomic clocks available to verify the times I clock in and out, I want to make sure I get paid for an accurate duration of time down to the nanosecond

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#202

Post by alsetmusic » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 2:43 AM UTC

Lammy wrote: post #178

cornholio wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the disaster plan for the disaster plan is to realize that it isn't that important at the human-level to have a clock meticulously set to correspond to other meticulously-set clocks, and that every attempt to force rigid timekeeping on humans is to try to make humans work more like machines rather than to make machines work more like humans.

"Wearing a watch is like being handcuffed to time."

-My Friend Andy

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#203

Post by quei7Ahm » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 2:46 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #143

Maxion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat interesting that they themselves don't have access to the site. You'd think there would have been some disaster plans put in place?

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 tra…

At this time the local power utility shows: Total of 140 outages affecting 24,981 customers. [1]

Remember - the Marshall fire started on December 30, 2021 under similar high wind conditions. [2] 1,000 structures destroyed, two deaths.

[1] https://co.my.xcelenergy.com/s/outage-safety/outage-map

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Fire

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#204

Post by philistine » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 2:54 AM UTC

autarch wrote: post #10

cdfuller wrote: post #5

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.

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

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

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#205

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 4:14 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #35

synack wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanner depends on having a time source with bounded error to maintain consistency. Google accomplishes this by having GPS and atomic clocks in several datacenters. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

And more importantly, the tighter the time bound, the higher the performance, so more accurate clocks easily pay for themselves in other saved infrastructure costs to service the same number of users.

[deleted]

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#206

Post by wolfbyte8 » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 4:38 AM UTC

I just got home from a holiday party where two people from NIST in Boulder work on the NIST-F1 Atomic Clock. The one scientist described the outage and the failures but reported that things are still shut down even after power was restored. She told me that she believes that the Trump administration is in the process of shutting down the program and server in Boulder. And there was low confidence in that the Washington DC superiors understood what they are doing. God I hope this isn't more Tina Peters retribution crap. Cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#207

Post by creatonez » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 5:03 AM UTC

8organicbits wrote: post #116

The referenced mailing list is this Google Group ( https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/internet-time-se... ) which has some other posts about this incident.

Where are you seeing the other posts?

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#208

Post by goku12 » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 5:40 AM UTC

arn3n wrote: post #14

Wind gusts were reaching 125 MPH in Boulder county, if anyone’s curious. A lot of power was shut off preemptively to prevent downed power lines from starting wildfires. Energy providers gave warning to locals in advance. Shame that NIST’s backup generator failed, though.

> Wind gusts were reaching 125 MPH in Boulder county, if anyone’s curious.

That's some strong winds! What's causing such strong sustained/gusty winds that long? I'm hearing about this weather phenomenon for the first time.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#209

Post by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 7:18 AM UTC

themafia wrote: post #26

> Facility operators anticipated needing to shutdown the heat-exchange infrastructure providing air cooling to many parts of the building, including some internal networking closets. As a result, many of these too were preemptively shutdown with the result that our group lacks much of the monitoring and control capabilities we ordinarily have Having a parallel low bandwidth, low power, low waste heat network infrastr…

Like reticulum?

https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#210

Post by ssl-3 » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

scheme271 wrote: post #199

ssl-3 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Losing the contents of (lots of) fridges is cheaper, as a whole, than incidentally burning the countryside. We all ultimately pay for the result no matter what, so that seems like a reasonably-sensible bet. On the fridge itself: You may find that the contents are insured against power outages. As an anecdote, my (completely not-special) homeowner's insurance didn't protest at all about writing a check for the…

It's probably not worth it to go through your insurance for the loss of food and perishables in the fridge/freezer. It counts as a claim on your home insurance and can result in increased rates or even your insurer dropping coverage at the next renewal.

Eh. It worked for me after that wind storm.

As previously-stated: There was no rate increase that I could discern.

I did neglect to mention that there was also no issue with renewal, but perhaps I should be more careful to always use absolute rote specificity and leave nothing to implication.

They also sent over some folks with a tall ladder to have a look at the roof of this property that they insured, which was good since we had no means to visually inspect it from the ground. (The roof was fine.)

Anecdotally, that phone call to the insurance company had no downside at all.

It provided a roof inspection that I did not have ready means to perform on my own, and a relatively small amount of money (a couple of hundred bucks) that became very useful not just because of lost food, but also due to all of the other storm-related issues that we were not insured against.