Yeah - that message really bugs me for some reason. It's as though it injects the fear that something is DEEPLY wrong straight into my chest...
The just queued the restart at some very low value of a unix timestamp, which translates to 36 years ago. Strangely, not the unix epoch at midnight Jan 1 1970.
Old post, but...
FYI, it uses the epoch of caker -- i.e. the birthday of caker, Linode's founder.