Fire-weather alert in Colorado knocked out timekeeping across the internet
WRAL••business
Key Points:
- A power outage on December 19 at NIST's Boulder campus, caused by preemptive power cuts from Xcel Energy due to severe fire weather conditions, disrupted the operation of the NIST-F4 atomic clock.
- The outage and a backup generator failure impacted the distribution of time signals from NIST’s atomic clocks, affecting radio broadcasts and internet time servers used globally.
- NIST successfully brought a backup time scale system online using additional atomic clocks, restoring time accuracy to within a few nanoseconds of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
- The NIST-F4 cesium fountain atomic clock is critical for ultra-precise timekeeping that supports technologies like GPS, power grid management, financial trading, and synchronization of internet-connected
