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> I described the problem to the agent and it figured out WAY faster than I would have been able to that the customer's clock was set incorrectly.

:blinks: The architecture of your service relied on customer clocks being correct? That is, you built a distributed service without a clock synchronization primitive that relied on the clocks being sychronized?

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I’m not sure that deploying a custom clock synchronisation system would be warranted to show a countdown timer on the screen. The fix is to accept that the interface may be potentially inaccurate by a few seconds and send the relative time rather than the expiry time. Also probably to make the expiry UI stable (ie. have a “try again” button rather than flipping back to the start screen when the timer expires).

I also think that expecting that a computer connected to the internet in 2026 has the correct time isn’t too much of a long shot and things like 2fa QR codes rely on correct timing anyway.

I don't know man, even AWS gives you cryptic errors if you have a drifting clock and try to perform some operations. Feels like a pretty forgivable mistake.

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