Date is wrong by months when set to automatically

Question

Since a few days my MacBook Air 2020 shows the wrong date when set to "Set date and time automatically". This is regardless of the chosen NTP server.

When time set manually, querying a NTP server from the command line returns:

$ sudo sntp -sS pool.ntp.org 
-9.789671 +/- 0.018845 pool.ntp.org 95.81.173.74

Which does not show date and time, but also no major offset.

The offset is consistent at 5 months, 2 days, 3 hours and 10 minutes.

• Tried time.apple.com and pool.ntp.org. No luck.
• Tried different time zones. No luck.
• Tried VPN to fake a different physical location. No luck.
• Changed WiFi networks, including using my phone as hotspot. No luck.
• NVRAM reset didn't help. No luck.

Fix

It somehow got fixed when I installed sntp (part of the ntp package) via Homebrew and ran it after running

sudo touch /var/db/ntp-kod
sudo chown root:wheel /var/db/ntp-kod

Note: I don't know if the installation of sntp via Homebrew is needed as macOS also has its own version.

Answer 1

Excellent question. There is a lot that you can do to inspect this process.

• How can I tell if my Mac is keeping the clock updated properly?

Some things to point out:

• Check which time servers you have selected
• Change them and retest
• If you have a VPN, try that and be sure you try without
• Look over your time zone (set it if it’s not correct while you sort out the time servers

Some computer is telling yours the wrong time, so think about networks and then dig into the command line tools if needed.