- NIST has confirmed that several public time servers have lost their atomic reference signal
- Generator failure disrupts distribution of America’s primary atomic time scale
- Some NIST servers responded normally while quietly providing inaccurate timestamps
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued an alert that some of its public time servers may be unreliable.
The advisory focuses on a defined set of hosts, including multiple time-xb.nist.gov addresses and the ntp-b.nist.gov authenticated service.
According to NIST, these systems can still respond to network queries while no longer referencing a valid atomic time source.
What went wrong at the Boulder plant
To avoid releasing incorrect data, the agency said it may temporarily take some of the affected hosts offline.
NIST traced the problem to its campus in Boulder, Colorado, where a prolonged power outage disrupted operations.
The outage occurred during high winds that damaged power lines and triggered safety shutdowns.
Even though backup power systems were in place, a downstream generator failure interrupted distribution of the atomic time scale that powers the Internet time service.
NIST said the UTC (NIST) signal drifted about four microseconds during the incident, a small but measurable deviation.
The disruption does not affect all NIST time endpoints. Widely used addresses such as time.nist.gov rely on round-robin DNS and geographically distributed infrastructure.
This design allows clients to automatically revert to unaffected locations when a site experiences issues.
Users who hardcode individual hostnames are more exposed to localized outages like this.
Systems running on cloud hosting platforms often rely on multi-tenant or upstream time sources, which can mask short-lived issues in any installation.
The Boulder site is home to the NIST-F4 atomic clock, which uses cesium atoms to define the length of a second with pinpoint precision, which underpins services used by telecommunications networks, power grids, financial platforms and scientific research.
Accurate synchronization is also fundamental in data center hosting environments, where synchronization affects logging, security protocols, and the ordering of transactions on distributed systems.
Many enterprise servers trust external authoritative sources, making upstream accuracy a shared dependency.
This incident follows another time service interruption earlier this month at the NIST facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which caused a larger time step error, measured in milliseconds, not microseconds.
NIST did not give a firm timeline for a full restoration in Boulder and said engineers were continuing restoration work.
Although most consumer systems are unlikely to notice the problem, high-precision users are expected to monitor multiple independent benchmarks.
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