NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power
32 comments
·December 20, 2025Animats
NIST campus status: Due to elevated fire risk and a power outage for the Boulder area, the DOC Boulder Labs campus is CLOSED on December 19 for onsite business and no public access is permitted; previously approved accesses are revoked.[1]
WWV still seems to be up, including voice phone access.
NIST Boulder has a recorded phone number for site status, and it says that as of December 20, the site is closed with no access.
NIST's main web site says they put status info on various social media accounts, but there's no announcement about this.
glkindlmann
Of the various internet .+P, NTP is one I never learned about as a student, so now I'm looking at its web page [1] by its creator David L. Mills (1938-2024). I've found one video of him giving a retrospective of his extensive internet work; he talks about NTP at 34:51 [2] and later at 56:26 [3].
[1] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html
ssl-3
HN discussion shortly after Dave Mills died, early in 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051246
arn3n
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.
Maxion
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?
cdfuller
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.
autarch
Time travel is extremely dangerous right now. I highly recommend deferring time travel plans except for extreme temporal emergencies.
yawpitch
Define “extreme”?
Animats
Google has their own fleet of atomic clocks and time servers. So does AWS. So does Microsoft. So does Ubuntu. They're not going to drift enough for months to cause trouble. So the Internet can ride through this, mostly.
The main problem will be services that assume at least one of the NIST time servers is up. Somewhere, there's going to be something that won't work right when all the NIST NTP servers are down. But what?
guenthert
Ubuntu using atomic clocks would surprise me. Sure they could, but it's not obvious to me why they would spend $$$$ on such. More plausible to me seems that they would be using GPSDO as reference clocks (in this context, about as good as your own atomic clock), iff they were running their own time servers. Google finds only that they are using servers from the NTP Pool Project, which will be using a variety of reference clocks.
If you have information on what they actually are using internally, please share.
genidoi
Atomic clock non-expert here, what does having a fleet of atomic clocks entail and why would the hyperscalers bother?
synack
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...
Gabrys1
Having clocks synchronized between your servers is extremely useful. For example, having a guarantee that the timestamp of arrival of a packet (measured by the clock on the destination) is ALWAYS bigger than the timestamp recorded by the sender is a huge win, especially for things like database scaling.
For this though you need to go beyond NTP into PTP which is still usually based on GPS time and atomic clocks
adastra22
I know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.
willis936
But pretty high on the list that NIST NTP is important for (since it leaves the building through the internet).
_zoltan_
could you list 3 things that you think are more important than the internet? (I know the internet is going to be fine; I just want to understand what you think ranks higher globally...)
franklyworks
Time engineers are very paranoid. I expect large problems can't occur due to a single provider misbehaving.
null
ThrowawayTestr
If your computer was using it as your time server and you didn't have alternatives configured your clock my have drifted a few seconds.
lovich
This was an NTP 0 server right? What is the actual failback mechanism when that level of NTP server fails?
This is some level of eldritch magic that I am aware of, but not familiar with but am interested in learning.
qmarchi
Man, they're having a hell of a time up in Boulder.
crazydoggers
Status of NIST time servers:
renewiltord
Well, where did NTP at NIST last put it? Did they look there?
Y_Y
You misunderstand, there's been a coup
adastra22
Of course there is. Where else would they put the reference standard chickens?
renewiltord
We have to stop those knaves pushing PTP! NTP must prevail!
> 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 infrastructure for this suddenly seems useful.