A staffer at the USA’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable backup generators powering some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors.

As explained in a mailing list post by Jeffrey Sherman, a NIST supervisory physicist who maintains the institute’s atomic clocks, “The atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage.”

Sherman, whose LinkedIn bio proclaims he is “One of the few federal employee actually paid to watch the clocks all day,” says one impact of the incident “is that the Boulder Internet Time Services no longer have an accurate time reference.”

That’s bad because one of the things NIST uses its atomic clocks for is to provide a Network Time Protocol service, the authoritative source of timing information that the computing world relies on so that diverse systems can synchronize events. If NTP isn’t working, outcomes can include difficulties authenticating between systems, meaning applications can become unstable.

At this point, readers might wonder why NIST can’t just turn off the inaccurate service. Sherman said a backup generator kicked in and kept the servers running.

“I will attempt to disable them [the generators] to avoid disseminating incorrect time,” he wrote.