Welcome to Time Keepers United

Time Keepers United is dedicated to presenting you with the most up-to-date time.

Why We Do This

Time Keepers United, well, keeps the time because we believe it is one of the most important concepts in the world.

When it comes to keeping time digitally, there are many standards and zones. Currently, we provide the time using the Date object in JavaScript, which is calculated using your local time and unix time.

What is Unix Time?

Unix time is a way of keeping time stored as the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970. This is useful to programmers since it can be stored cleanly as a 32-bit signed integer. The problem with this, though, is integer overflow.

But First, Y2K

The integer overflow encountered in the most common way of storing Unix Time (signed 32-bit int) will occur in the year 2038. This actually very similar to the Y2K problem. During that, since memory and storage sizes were small (and larger sizes were quite expensive) the year would be stored as the last two digits (19XX). This initally seemed a good solution as it saved on space, but once people realized that when year 2000 (Y2K) rolled around, the clock would go from 1999 to 1900, instead of 2000. The ensuing panic over the Y2K bug, would have a lasting effect for many years even after the bug was fixed.

The Epochalypse

Well, what does Y2K have to do with unix time? The answer is that the bug that was encountered in the 90's could happen again in the year 2038, albeit on a much larger scale. When the date January 19th, 2038 at 03:14:07 Universal Coordinated Time comes around, the 32-bit signed integer will go from 2³¹-1 to -2³¹, or 2³¹ seconds before January 1st, 1970 (December 13th, 1901). Because of how much larger the internet and computers as a whole are now compared to the 90's, this could be potentially catastrophic.

The Solution

Despite the ubiquitous nature of the signed 32-bit integer used to display Unix time (to save space, among other things), the fix is quite simple. Moving the storage from a 32 to 64-bit signed integer would significantly delay the bug, to approximately 292 billion years in the future, which at that point the universe would have ceased to exist.