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I this question, I replied to a comment. The comment I replied to then appeared below my comment with a timestamp in the future:

enter image description here

The comments will now just appear out of sequence, but at the time the timestamp was in the future.

This has been posted a couple of times in the past, but it appears to be happening again.

Update: There have been reported incidents of this also occurring in other areas where timestamps are generated, such as the closed question notices and in chat.

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  • 11
    Really, 'in 31 seconds'? Oi, someone nicked my timemachine!
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 16:16
  • 5
    Time is ‮ !gnilevarnu
    – Naftali
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 16:22
  • Now my head hurts, thanks >.>
    – Rawling
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 16:24
  • 4
    Who knew they even had code that compensated for times past the current time... Planning for something are we Stack Exchange? Spill the beans!
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 16:24
  • 1
    @amanaPlanaCAnalPAnaMA Hilariously, in IE8 View Source, your comment causes a <naps/> tag to appear instead of a </span>.
    – Rawling
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 16:27
  • @Rawling hehe it used to do that in the Chrome Inspector too, but it seems like they fixed that lol
    – Naftali
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 16:28
  • There's definitely something wonky going on. The transcript of a chat I just had has the message order flipped. And another room's info says the last message was posted -35 seconds ago. That's at least the weird stuff I see. Not sure if that's just a local thing though.
    – Bart
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 16:30
  • 1
    By the way, these comments' ids ordering is right. Weird.
    – raina77ow
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 16:35
  • 3
    +1 for mentioning the cock blender
    – slaphappy
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 17:04
  • @Bart seems likely.
    – R. Martinho Fernandes
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 17:07
  • @amanaPlanaCAnalPAnaMA Using the <naps/> html there are you?
    – Richard J. Ross III
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 17:08
  • 8
    They've build timemachines and precognitive robots, and they still haven't fixed the damn review???
    – yannis
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 17:09
  • 2
    @Yannis: And it seems they don't plan to, otherwise they would've sent the fix back in time.
    – Xeo
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 17:10
  • it's the end of the world coming, 2012 is almost over
    – Sam I am says Reinstate Monica
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 17:18
  • 1
    Very possibly related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/156383/…
    – user102937
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 17:30

3 Answers 3

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24

This was actually caused by the hurricane failover and our silly decision to seize FSMO roles. When you do this to an AD environment, you have to setup the new PDC Emulator master as the authoritative time source on the network.

We, uh, didn't do that, so as a result all manner of time desynchronization has occured. I get to take the blame for it, but I also just fixed it so I guess it's a wash.

The problem should not recur!

Edit

Translation: When we failed over to our secondary datacenter because of Hurricane SUPERSTORM Sandy, we didn't set up time synchronization correctly so our servers got out of sync. Two submissions to different servers could thus get timestamps off by up to a minute or two.

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8

This was caused by the same time sync issues as Eeek! Chat made the robot precognitive!, which also has an answer by Pete with an acronym-laden explanation.

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3

Something bad happened to the NTP sources in the US over the weekend. You can see reports across the net, eg here. I'd wager this is something to do with it.

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1
  • "The clocks should have been marked as insane" - nice
    – Rawling
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 17:58

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