Why does being able to load websites / browse internet depend on my computer’s clock being right?

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I notice that if I’ve traveled and my computer’s system clock is wrong by time zone, or I have not started up a computer in a long time (battery went dead) and its clock is wrong, that computer will not even be able to visit regular old websites on the internet (to look up information, what time it is, etc).

But if I reset the clock to approximately the correct time, things are back to normal. Why does it depend on this?

In: Technology

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Adding to what’s been said, this can be a tricky one to troubleshoot.

We had issues where I worked with some users being able to sign in, but getting immediately kicked back to the login screen.

Eventually found a user who was having the problem and was willing to get on a video conference call.

Turned out his PC was set to Pacific time (the default out of the box for Windows), but the clock was set manually to the time in Eastern.

When he signed in the server would tell the browser how long his session was good for.

The time he got back was for an hour later in Eastern time.

So if it was 1pm EST, it would expire at 2pm.

With the way his computer was set up, 1pm PST was effectively 4pm EST, so his browser thought his session had already expired and he needed to sign in again.

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