- NIST has confirmed that several public time servers have lost their atomic reference signal
- The generator failure interrupted the propagation of America's primary atomic time scale.
- Some NIST servers responded normally but quietly provided inaccurate timestamps.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a warning that some of its public time servers may be unreliable.
advisory focuses on a specific set of hosts, including several time-xb.nist.gov addresses and the authenticated ntp-b.nist.gov service.
According to NIST, these systems can still respond to network requests without any longer referencing a valid atomic time source.
What went wrong at the Boulder site
To prevent the spread of incorrect data, the agency said it may temporarily shut down some of the affected hosts.
NIST traced the problem to its campus in Boulder, Colorado, where an extended power outage disrupted operations.
The outage occurred during high winds that damaged power lines and caused outages for safety reasons.
Although backup power systems were in place, the failure of a downstream generator interrupted the atomic time scale distribution that powers the Internet Time Service.
NIST stated that at the time of the incident, the UTC (NIST) signal was off by approximately four microseconds, a small but measurable offshoot.
The breach does not affect all NIST time endpoints. Widely used addresses such as time.nist.gov are based on round-robin DNS and a geographically distributed infrastructure.
This design allows clients to automatically revert to unaffected locations when problems occur on one of the sites.
Users who have hardcoded individual hostnames are more likely to experience local failures such as this one.
Systems running on cloud hosting platforms often rely on pooled or upstream time sources that can mask short-term problems at any given site.
The Boulder site hosts the NIST-F4 atomic clock, which uses cesium atoms to determine the length of a second with extreme precision, which underlies services used by telecommunications networks, power grids, financial platforms and scientific research.
Accurate timing is also critical for data center hosting environments where synchronization affects logging, security protocols, and transaction order in distributed systems.
Many enterprises servers trust external authoritative sources, making the accuracy of the original data a shared dependency.
This incident follows another time service failure earlier this month at the NIST facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which caused a large time step error, measured in milliseconds rather than microseconds.
NIST did not provide an exact timeline for full restoration in Boulder and said engineers were continuing restoration work.
Although most consumer systems are unlikely to notice this problem, users are expected to track multiple independent links with high accuracy.
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