Our legacy 32-bit root servers used the FreeBSD operating system. As with all Unix and Unix-like operating systems, time and dates in FreeBSD are represented internally as the number of seconds since the UNIX Epoch, which was the 1st of January 1970 GMT.

32-bit systems can only store a maximum of 2³¹ non-negative seconds (2,147,483,648 seconds or about 68 years). Which means that 32-bit UNIX systems won't be able to process time beyond 19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM GMT.

All of our Unix product offerings use 64-bit architecture systems that can store a maximium of 2⁶³ non-negative seconds (9,223,372,036,854,775,808 [9.2 Quintillion] seconds or about 292.27 Billion years), which is about 22 times the estimated age of our universe!

For the curious: A switch to 128-bit architecture systems would yield a maximum of 2¹²⁷ non-negative seconds (170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,728 [170 Undecillion] seconds), or about 18.4 Quintillion times as many as 64-bit systems.

For the really curious: A switch to 256-bit architecture systems would yield a maximum of 2²⁵⁵ non-negative seconds (57,896,044,618,658,097,711,785,492,504,343,953,926,634,992,332,820,282,019,728,792,003,956,564,819,968 [57 Quattuorvigintillion] seconds), or about 340 Undecillion times as many as 128-bit systems.