Between the hours of 13:37 and 14:22 on 2025-11-17, approximately 100% of users encountered “chronological confusion” across all systems. The event was triggered by a code change at 13:37 UTC introducing a Linux timestamp display feature into the dashboard. Unfortunately, the developer misinterpreted the timestamp (in seconds since 1970) as a human-readable date, resulting in users seeing “January 1st, 1970, 00:00:00” everywhere — including billing, support tickets, and the CEO’s calendar.
A bug in the conversion logic caused all time-based events to “travel back in time,” effectively making our database believe it was the dawn of Unix. The event was detected by the Finance Department, when invoices were suddenly generated for “-55 years ago.” The team rolled back the feature and restarted the timeline, restoring the normal flow of causality.
This SEV-1 incident affected everyone, including developers who temporarily lost faith in linear time.
This incident was detected when an “All Time Low Revenue Alert” was triggered and Accounting was paged.
Next, DevOps On-Call was paged because Accounting’s “problem” was apparently caused by the system reporting that every customer’s subscription had expired in 1970. Response was delayed by 12 minutes as the on-call engineer attempted to Google “how to reboot the universe.”
A timestamp sanity check will be added by Platform Engineering so that no future system can claim to exist before disco music.
For 45 minutes between 13:37 UTC and 14:22 UTC on 11/17/2025, users experienced mass temporal disarray.
This incident affected all customers (100% of dashboard users), who experienced missing timelines, zero revenue reports, and historical inaccuracies in all logs.
42 support tickets and 173 sarcastic tweets were submitted, mostly including screenshots captioned “Nice throwback, guys.”
All times are UTC.
- 13:37 – Developer merges “Human-readable timestamps” PR to main.
- 13:38 – Dashboard proudly shows “Last updated: 00:00:00, January 1, 1970.”
- 13:40 – QA assumes it’s a timezone bug and goes for coffee.
- 13:45 – Accounting reports revenue chart looks “a bit prehistoric.”
- 13:50 – PagerDuty triggers for “Zero Transactions in the Last 55 Years.”
- 14:00 – Engineering confirms timestamps are displayed raw (e.g., “1731417462”) and are being used in SQL queries as real datetimes.
- 14:10 – Rollback initiated, though Jenkins timestamps claim rollback started in 1969.
- 14:22 – All systems restored; users once again inhabit the present.
- 14:30 – Developer apologizes, claiming “I thought Linux time was cool.”
After receiving the page at 13:50 UTC, on-call DevOps engineer (Bob) joined the incident bridge at 13:53 UTC.
Bob quickly realized the root cause involved timestamps, uttered “oh no, not again,” and called in Backend Specialist Alice at 13:55 UTC, who confirmed that all timestamps were being rendered as integers instead of formatted strings.
Alice manually reverted the PR using the “time-travel” feature (git revert) and purged all references to new Date(0).
An overzealous developer introduced a “Linux timestamp view” without converting seconds since epoch to human-readable format. The system accepted the raw integer as a legitimate date, confusing downstream systems into thinking it was January 1, 1970 — also known as “the beginning of everything.”
The team restored service by rolling back the timestamp change, clearing cached epoch values, and reindexing time-series data. Once the timeline was re-synchronized with reality, the universe continued normally.
This same root cause nearly occurred during the “Leap Second Fiasco of 2022,” when the same developer asked, “Wait, seconds can leap?”
- Add unit tests ensuring all timestamps are formatted before rendering (assigned to Alice, due 2025-11-25).
- Introduce monitoring for sudden drops in chronological consistency (Platform Eng).
- Schedule a mandatory training session titled “Unix Time: Why You Shouldn’t Set It Free.”
- Update code review checklist to include “Does this change break time?”