John Carlos Baez @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz
Public

Ouch! The most accurate standard of time in the USA has gone down!

Yup, a bunch of atomic clocks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado may have lost power - and just to be safe, NIST has stopped broadcasting the time.

It's like someone took this "end times" business too literally.

Luckily NIST has other atomic clocks... and if those fail, there are plenty elsewhere, so we won't permanently lose track of time. But what about right now?

Anyone know the latest news? This report is from 5:18 pm December 19th, Pacific Standard Time:

lists.nanog.org/archives/list/

but if more news shows up, it may appear here:

groups.google.com/a/list.nist.

Dear colleagues, In short, the atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage. One impact is that the Boulder Internet Time Services no longer have an accurate time reference. At time of writing the Boulder servers are still available due a standby power generator, but I will attempt to disable them to avoid disseminating incorrect time. The affected servers are: time-a-b.nist.gov time-b-b.nist.gov time-c-b.nist.gov time-d-b.nist.gov time-e-b.nist.gov ntp-b.nist.gov (authenticated NTP) No time to repair estimate is available until we regain staff access and power. Efforts are currently focused on obtaining an alternate source of power so the hydrogen maser clocks survive beyond their battery backups. More details follow. Due to prolonged high wind gusts there have been a combination of utility power line damage and preemptive utility shutdowns (in the interest of wildfire prevention) in the Boulder, CO area. NIST's campus lost utility power Wednesday (Dec. 17 2025) around 22:23 UTC. At time of writing utility power is still off to the campus. 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.
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