If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST.
Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated.
But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by more than 5 microseconds.
5 μs might seem insignificant. But it is significant for scientists and universities who rely on NIST's more specialized timing signals.
But no, you don't need to panic. And yes, they have it under control now.
But I thought I'd go over what happened, what it means, and what we can learn from NIST's near-outage.
Video
This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of my most recent YouTube video:
What happened
The NIST campus, which distributes Internet time on six of the most popular NTP servers, lost power last Wednesday.
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