We all enjoy taking a late morning and some extra sleep now and then, but usually we want to do it on purpose. A large number of Swedish iPhone owners who use their iPhone as an alarm clock got an unexpectedly late start this morning when it turned out that their iPhone’s clock was running two hours behind.
The culprit apparently was the time synchronization server of their Swedish phone operator, which the iPhone synchronizes its clock against.
The time shift occurred this morning between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m. local time. Not all users were affected, but enough to make the Swedish news. (Swedish blogger Joakim Jardenberg first broke the news.)
Updated reports say not only iPhone users were affected but also other phones that used the operator’s time synchronization servers, including Android phones. Apparently the wrong time zone was broadcasted to all phones which had automatic time synchronization activated. The sudden time change was triggered by planned maintenance work (but obviously shifting the time zone was not intentional).
Judging by the comments we’ve seen there were a number of people who were late dropping off the kids and going to work this morning. Hopefully no one missed a flight.
Fortunately – or unfortunately for the most prominent sleepyheads here at the office – we at Pingdom weren’t affected and were here on time this morning. (An hour or two of extra sleep would have been nice… 😉 ).
Now imagine this happening with AT&T in the US and its much larger user base. 🙂
These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]
