> 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.
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.
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].
In [3] he mentions that one can use NTP to observe frequency deviations and use it as an early warning system for fire and AC failure. That really intrigues me. Can you actually? Has this ever been implemented?
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.
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.
Same for database transaction roll back and roll forward actions.
And most enterprises, including banks, use databases.
So by bad luck, you may get a couple of transactions reversed in order of time, such as a $20 debit incorrectly happening before a $10 credit, when your bank balance was only $10 prior to both those transactions. So your balance temporarily goes negative.
Now imagine if all those amounts were ten thousand times higher ...
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?
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.
I think people have a wrong idea of what a modern atomic clock looks like. These are readily available commercially, Microchip for example will happily sell you hydrogen, cesium or rubidium atomic clocks. Hydrogen masers are rather unwieldy, but you can get a rubidium clock in a 1U format and cesium ones are not much bigger. I think their cesium freq standards are formerly a HP business they acquired.
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
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.
And more importantly, the tighter the time bound, the higher the performance, so more accurate clocks easily pay for themselves in other saved infrastructure costs to service the same number of users.
If NIST NTP goes down, the internet doesn’t go down. But atomic clocks drifting does upset many scientific experiments, which would effectively go down for the duration of the outage.
This is the reason GP listed out all the alternative robust NTP services that are GPS disciplined, freely available, and used as redundant sources by any responsible timekeeper.
What atomic clocks are disciplined by NTP anyway? Local GPS disciplining is the standard. If you're using NTP you don't need precision or accuracy in your timekeeping.
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...)
The ability for humankind to communicate across the entire globe at nearly 1/4 of the speed of light has drastically accelerated our technological advancement. There is no doubt that the internet is a HUGE addition to society.
It's not super important when compared to basic needs like plumbing, food, electricity, medical assistance and other silly things we take for granted but are heavily dependent on. We all saw what happened to hospitals during the early stages of the COVID pandemic; we had plenty of internet and electricity but were struggling on the medical part. That was quite bad... I'm not sure if it's any worse if an entire country/continent lost access to the Internet. Quite a lot of our core infrastructure components in society rely on this. And a fair bit of it relies on a common understanding of what time "now" is.
Mostly scientific stuff like astronomical observations — e.g. did this event observed at one telescope coincide with neutrinos detected at this other observatory.
Note I didn’t say they are more important than the Internet. That’s a value judgement in any case. I said that NIST level 0 NTp servers are more important to these use cases than they are to the Internet.
There's two other sites for the time.nist.gov service so it'll be okay.
Probably more interesting is how you get a tier 0 site back in sync - NIST rents out these cyberpunk looking units you can use to get your local frequency standards up to scratch for ~$700/month https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/frequency-measurement...
There are lots of Stratum 0 servers out there; basically anything with an atomic clock will do. They all count seconds independently from one another, all slowly diverging over time, with offset intervals being measured by mutual synchronization using a number of means (how is this done is interesting all by itself). Some atomic clocks are more accurate than others, and an ensemble of these is typically regarded as 'the' master clock.
Beyond this, as other commenters have said, anyone who is really dependent on having exact time (such as telcos, broadcasters, and those running global synchronized databases) should have their own atomic clock fleets. Thousands and thousands of them worldwide Moreover, GPS time, used by many to act as their time reference, is distributed by yet other means.
Nothing bad will happen, except to those who have deliberately made these specific Stratum 0 clocks their only reference time. Anyone who has either left their computer at its factory settings or has set up their NTP configuration in accordance to recommended settings will be unaffected by this.
Having a parallel low bandwidth, low power, low waste heat network infrastructure for this suddenly seems useful.
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.
[1] https://www.nist.gov/campus-status
[1] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html
[2] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=WXJCV_v0qlZQK3m4&t=2092
[3] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=K80ThtYZWcOAxUga&t=3386
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.
And most enterprises, including banks, use databases.
So by bad luck, you may get a couple of transactions reversed in order of time, such as a $20 debit incorrectly happening before a $10 credit, when your bank balance was only $10 prior to both those transactions. So your balance temporarily goes negative.
Now imagine if all those amounts were ten thousand times higher ...
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?
If you have information on what they actually are using internally, please share.
Example: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...
For this though you need to go beyond NTP into PTP which is still usually based on GPS time and atomic clocks
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
What atomic clocks are disciplined by NTP anyway? Local GPS disciplining is the standard. If you're using NTP you don't need precision or accuracy in your timekeeping.
It's not super important when compared to basic needs like plumbing, food, electricity, medical assistance and other silly things we take for granted but are heavily dependent on. We all saw what happened to hospitals during the early stages of the COVID pandemic; we had plenty of internet and electricity but were struggling on the medical part. That was quite bad... I'm not sure if it's any worse if an entire country/continent lost access to the Internet. Quite a lot of our core infrastructure components in society rely on this. And a fair bit of it relies on a common understanding of what time "now" is.
Note I didn’t say they are more important than the Internet. That’s a value judgement in any case. I said that NIST level 0 NTp servers are more important to these use cases than they are to the Internet.
- GPS
- industrial complex that synchronize operations (we could include trains)
- telecoms in general (so a level higher than the internet)
This is some level of eldritch magic that I am aware of, but not familiar with but am interested in learning.
Probably more interesting is how you get a tier 0 site back in sync - NIST rents out these cyberpunk looking units you can use to get your local frequency standards up to scratch for ~$700/month https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/frequency-measurement...
To quote the ITU: "UTC is based on about 450 atomic clocks, which are maintained in 85 national time laboratories around the world." https://www.itu.int/hub/2023/07/coordinated-universal-time-a...
Beyond this, as other commenters have said, anyone who is really dependent on having exact time (such as telcos, broadcasters, and those running global synchronized databases) should have their own atomic clock fleets. Thousands and thousands of them worldwide Moreover, GPS time, used by many to act as their time reference, is distributed by yet other means.
Nothing bad will happen, except to those who have deliberately made these specific Stratum 0 clocks their only reference time. Anyone who has either left their computer at its factory settings or has set up their NTP configuration in accordance to recommended settings will be unaffected by this.
https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi