"Microsoft hasn’t really been helpful in trying to track this, either. I’ve sent over logs and information, but they haven’t really followed this up. They seem more interested in closing the case.”

That’s the Microsoft way: ignore the bug report for a month or two then close the case for “inactivity”.

With these updated routing tables, a lot of people were unable to make calls, as we didn’t have a correct state

You’re relying on windows for critical infrastructure? Are you nuts?

“feature”

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

“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.

Windows systems with clocks set to the wrong time can cause disastrous errors when they can’t properly parse timestamps in digital certificates or they execute jobs too early, too late, or out of the prescribed order.

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.

The original article contains 701 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Ignoring tickets and than closing it for inactivity is how big companies ignore their own fuck-ups.

Fun fact: Apparently M$ laid off their QA team for Windows so if you’re wondering why updates break so much, that’s why.

I’ve read the documentation on that feature, and still don’t get over it. How can anyone with knowledge of computers be so dumb to even consider such an idea, lest implement it?

This feature is just a BIG flag waving “AbUsE mE!”

“The false assumption is that most SSL implementations return the server time,” Simen said. “This was probably true in a Microsoft-only ecosystem back when they implemented it, but at that time [when STS was introduced], OpenSSL was already sending random data instead.”

This is so amazing, NTP is too insecure, so we relied on random data from random servers instead

Last problem I had was our server serving 2FA decided it was not on the same timezone, so when I tried to connect with my Authenticator code, it says “check your time on your cellphone”. I had to call IT…

Sounds like an interesting idea. Pity MS can’t be bothered to iron out the issues with it.