Live Unix Timestamp
The current Unix timestamp is the number of seconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z. This page ticks live, lets you freeze on demand, and switches between seconds, milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds for whatever your downstream consumer needs.
Quick Conversion
Formula: ms = sec × 1000
Milestone epochs
| Moment | Epoch (sec) | ISO 8601 |
|---|---|---|
| Unix epoch zero | 0 | 1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z |
| First Bitcoin block | 1231006505 | 2009-01-03T18:15:05.000Z |
| Y2K | 946684800 | 2000-01-01T00:00:00.000Z |
| 1234567890 | 1234567890 | 2009-02-13T23:31:30.000Z |
| ECMAScript 6 launch | 1434499200 | 2015-06-17T00:00:00.000Z |
| 1700000000 | 1700000000 | 2023-11-14T22:13:20.000Z |
| Current page load | 1780138031 | 2026-05-30T10:47:11.000Z |
| 1 billion epoch | 1000000000 | 2001-09-09T01:46:40.000Z |
| 2038 cliff | 2147483647 | 2038-01-19T03:14:07.000Z |
| 3000-01-01 | 32503680000 | 3000-01-01T00:00:00.000Z |
Convert to a specific date? Timestamp → date converter.
Live epoch — code recipes
JavaScript: Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000)
Python: int(time.time())
Go: time.Now().Unix()
Rust: std::time::SystemTime::now()
.duration_since(UNIX_EPOCH).unwrap().as_secs()
Bash: date +%s
SQL (PG): EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM now())::bigintWorked: the value above the odometer is computed via Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000) every animation frame.
How to grab the current Unix timestamp
- 1Watch the odometer tick — each frame the browser polls Date.now() and rerenders the digits.
- 2Pick your precision pill: seconds (10 digits), ms (13), µs (16), ns (19). The bold output updates immediately.
- 3Click Pause when you want to copy a stable value — the odometer freezes and the bold output holds.
- 4Tap the clipboard icon next to the bold value (or any of the four secondary rows).
- 5Hit Snapshot to drop the current value into your in-browser history with timestamp + unit.
Why every system in 2026 still counts seconds since 1970
In 2026 a backend engineer pasting a Slack incident note needs the current Unix timestamp to mark the moment the bug started. Typing `date +%s` works on Linux, isn't available in a browser. This page is the one-tap, copy-pasteable replacement.
Unix time was born when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie released the first UNIX in 1969 at Bell Labs. The arbitrary epoch — 1970-01-01T00:00:00 GMT — was chosen because it was a recent Thursday and the system had to start counting somewhere. The 1971 UNIX programmer's manual stored time in sixtieths of a second; that wrapped after 2.5 years, so by V6 (1975) it was one-second resolution.
POSIX.1-1990 codified the contract: a signed integer counting seconds since the epoch, every UTC day equal to 86,400 seconds, leap seconds smeared (not counted). POSIX.1-2017 retained that contract. C's time_t on every modern OS is now a 64-bit signed integer.
JavaScript made a different choice. Brendan Eich, designing Mocha (later JavaScript) in 1995, picked milliseconds — the Java convention. Date.now() returns ms-since-epoch as a double, valid for ±285,616 years. ECMAScript 5 (2009) standardised it. Today every JS-shaped API emits ms while every Unix-shaped API emits seconds — the eternal off-by-three-zeros bug.
NTP, the Network Time Protocol (Mills, 1985), keeps every connected device's clock within ~10ms of UTC. RFC 5905 (2010) is the current version. Browsers display whatever the OS clock says, which is typically NTP-disciplined on consumer hardware. Hit the OS "sync now" if your laptop's been suspended for a week and the displayed epoch looks off.
Sub-second precision matters more every year. PostgreSQL TIMESTAMP is µs-precision; OpenTelemetry spans are ns; high-frequency trading uses TAI ns with PTP hardware timestamping. The odometer above ticks at 60 Hz, the same cadence as a modern monitor — adequate for human copy-paste but not for HFT.
The 2038 problem looms: on 2038-01-19T03:14:07Z the signed 32-bit Unix counter overflows to 1901. Linux fixed it in glibc 2.32 (2020); embedded firmware lags. If you see a banner above warning that the epoch exceeds 2 billion, audit your stack. Otherwise, the epoch is your friend — universal, sortable, and language-agnostic.
Trusted by backend, SRE, DBA and analytics teams
“I leave this tab open during incidents. The live ticker is exactly what I copy-paste into Slack to set 'as of now'.”
“Toggling between sec/ms/µs/ns is faster than my shell aliases. The ns precision saved a Prometheus query.”
“Our Snowflake jobs need µs epoch. This page gives me the right number in one tap. Top-tier dev tool.”
“I do a lot of timestamp-stamping in notebooks. The pause-and-copy flow is exactly right.”
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