[HN] Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  A few months ago, an engineer in a data center in Norway encountered some perplexing errors that caused a Windows server to suddenly reset its system clock to 55 days in the future.

  The engineer relied on the server to maintain a routing table that tracked cell phone numbers in real time as they were being moved from one carrier to the other.

  “With these updated routing tables, a lot of people were unable to make calls, as we didn’t have a correct state!” the engineer, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Simen, wrote in an email.

  Simen had experienced a similar error last August when a machine running Windows Server 2019 reset its clock to January 2023 and then changed it back a short time later.

  The mechanism, Microsoft engineers wrote, “helped us to break the cyclical dependency between client system time and security keys, including SSL certificates.”

  Simen and Ken, who both asked to be identified only by their first names because they weren’t authorized by their employers to speak on the record, soon found that engineers and administrators had been reporting the same time resets since 2016.

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