Time appeared to skip a beat last week when some of the world’s most accurate clocks were affected by a wind-induced power outage. The clocks were off by about five-millionths of a second — way faster than a blink or a snap of the fingers.
You probably didn’t notice, and the impact was minimal because other government clocks kept ticking along as usual.
Still, for a time standard used as a reference point for everything from mobile phones to aerospace applications, even the tiniest of delays could be a big deal.
Some of the government’s highly precise atomic clocks sit on the Boulder, Colo., campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that oversees the Internet Time Service.. As high winds whipped through Colorado on Wednesday, a generator failed, causing a delay of about five-millionths of a second, according to an email that Jeff Sherman, an official with the N.I.S.T., sent to a public email list.
The precision of U.S. official time is important for scientific applications, telecommunications and critical infrastructure, where synchronization between two or more locations is necessary, like for G.P.S. devices, bank and stock transactions, and even for emails.
But the impact last week was “minimal,” according to Rebecca Jacobson of the N.I.S.T., because the agency’s system is built around a dispersed network of clocks and servers.
“No one keeps time alone,” Ms. Jacobson wrote in an email, “and redundancies that are built into our national timekeeping system are designed exactly for events like this.”
Atomic clocks are not ordinary time pieces. The most sophisticated atomic clock at the Boulder facility uses lasers, detectors and finely-tuned microwaves, among other gadgetry, to extract timing pulses from cesium atoms.
That clock is so accurate that it if it had started running 100 million years ago, it would be off by less than a second today, according to the N.I.S.T.
The Internet Time Service enables computers and other networked devices to synchronize their internal clocks with official U.S. time, according to the N.I.S.T. Many devices are preprogrammed to check once a day, or once an hour, the agency said. The time on our smartphones comes from these atomic clocks, albeit indirectly.
The overall disruption was minimal, Mr. Sherman said, in part because atomic clocks at other facilities in the United States, including in Fort Collins, Colo., and Gaithersburg, Md., were unaffected. He also noted that many people in the United States access U.S. official time via the internet, where deviations of one-thousandth of a second are typical.
Some direct fiber-optic links were affected by the recent power outage, Mr. Sherman said in his email, without elaborating.
Those who rely on the N.I.S.T. servers also have access to other networks in other locations to ensure uninterrupted service, though, so it remains unclear just how far-reaching the impact was for them.
Thankfully, as Ms. Jacobson said, “time isn’t broken.”
Mike Ives is a reporter for The Times based in Seoul, covering breaking news around the world.
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