US Time Running Late: NIST Lab Power Outage Triggers Rare 4.8-Microsecond Lag in Atomic Clock, Delay Could Impact GPS and Telecoms
The incident happened on December 17, 2025, when high winds downed utility lines and prompted preemptive power shutdowns to mitigate wildfire risks. While NIST’s atomic clocks are equipped with battery backups and generators, a critical backup system failed, leading to a temporary lapse in time synchronization and distribution.
Mumbai, December 22: A severe windstorm in Colorado has caused a rare disruption to the official timekeeping system in the US. A prolonged power outage at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) laboratory in Boulder resulted in the official US time, known as NIST UTC, slipping approximately 4.8 microseconds behind the global standard.
The incident happened on December 17, 2025, when high winds downed utility lines and prompted preemptive power shutdowns to mitigate wildfire risks. While NIST’s atomic clocks are equipped with battery backups and generators, a critical backup system failed, leading to a temporary lapse in time synchronization and distribution.
Time Running 4.8 Microseconds Late After Massive Storm in US
Impacts on Infrastructure
A microsecond is one-millionth of a second. While a drift of 4.8 microseconds is imperceptible to the human eye - taking roughly 350,000 microseconds just to blink - it carries significant weight for high-precision technologies.
Experts warn that even a tiny delay can create "glitches" in critical systems, including:
- GPS Navigation: Satellite signals rely on nanosecond-level precision to calculate location; a microsecond error can translate into positional inaccuracies.
- Telecommunications: Mobile networks use synchronized timing to hand off data packets between towers.
- Financial Markets: High-frequency trading platforms require exact timestamps to sequence global transactions.
Redundancies and Recovery
NIST supervisory physicist Jeffrey Sherman confirmed that the "atomic ensemble" - the group of 16 atomic clocks that calculate the time - remained operational on battery power. However, the connection to the servers that distribute this time to the public and private sectors was compromised.
"The atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage," Sherman stated in a technical update. He noted that some Internet Time Service (ITS) servers were temporarily disabled to prevent the spread of inaccurate data.
To maintain stability, NIST advised high-end users, such as aerospace and telecommunications organizations, to utilize the U.S. Naval Observatory’s time signals as a secondary reference.
Current Status
Utility power was restored to the Boulder facility over the weekend. Technical teams are currently working to recalibrate the system and gradually correct the 4.8-microsecond drift to bring NIST UTC back into perfect alignment with Coordinated Universal Time.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Dec 22, 2025 07:37 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).