HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The world transitioning from one quarter century to the next on New Year’s Day 2026 may be a nice bit of trivia in itself. 

As the clock chimes midnight on January 1, 2026, exactly 9131 days will have passed since the beginning of the century on January 1, 2001.

But strictly speaking, that’s not quite true for some island dwellers in the South Pacific Ocean. A lot has changed in the world of time and date in the past 25 years, and that includes Samoa and Tokelau redrawing the International Date Line. In 2011, the Pacific islands switched from the east of the line to the west, effectively skipping December 30.

There’s more…

But Wait, It Gets Worse... !

Jeff Sherman of NIST posted the following information on December 19 about an apparent equipment failure at NIST's Boulder, Colorado campus:

In short, the atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage. One impact is that the Boulder Internet Time Services no longer have an accurate time reference. [empasis added] At time of writing the Boulder servers are still available due a standby power generator, but I will attempt to disable them to avoid disseminating incorrect time.

 The affected servers are:

time-a-b.nist.gov

time-b-b.nist.gov

time-c-b.nist.gov

time-d-b.nist.gov

time-e-b.nist.gov

ntp-b.nist.gov (authenticated NTP)

No time to repair estimate is available until we regain staff access and power. Efforts are currently focused on obtaining an alternate source of power so the hydrogen maser clocks survive beyond their battery backups.