GoKawiilThe opposite is actually the case. If we do not have a common understanding of what “now” is, a lot of things we take for granted will stop working.
This summer, Australia realized this the hard way. Let me take this opportunity to give an example of why time matters to a modern society, what happened in this particular case, and what our key takeaways are.
On 8 July 2026, a large part of the mobile network run by Australia's largest cell phone operator Telstra stopped working with voice calls not getting through or text messages that didn't arrive. There were even calls to Australia's emergency number that did not get through. But the outage affected systems even further apart, such as trains, payment terminals, ticketing systems and EV chargers being disrupted.
No networks were attacked. Nobody accidentally cut the fiber. All systems had electrical power. The culprit, you may ask? A single GPS receiver in a single chassis in Melbourne coming back from scheduled maintenance believing the year was 2006, and the rest of the network was persuaded to believe it.
Telstra commissioned an independent review from the company Technology Audit Partners (TAP) and the report is a very interesting read, because the same type of failure could appear in many critical services, including some we depend on to keep people alive.
In order for many of these systems to function, time being correct, or at least the same everywhere, is crucial. And as everyone in the business knows, “correct” is a relative term. There is no exact time, only time held within a certain margin of a reference. How wide that margin may be depends entirely on what you are doing or in which business you operate in.
Running a mobile network, like Telstra, is about as time-dependent as a business gets.
Modern mobile communication explains why time matters
Modern cell phone protocols will not work without precision time. Mobile networks separate uplink data from downlink by either FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) or TDD (Time Division Duplex).
FDD gives each direction its own slice of spectrum, so both can run continuously without colliding.
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