Unix time explained

You often run into a number like 1762000000 standing in for a date. It's a Unix timestamp: the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970 at midnight UTC, a reference point shared by nearly every system.

Why a plain number

An integer is unambiguous: no format to parse, no timezone glued to the value, trivial comparisons and arithmetic. Timezone and formatting only apply at display time, for humans.

💡 Anecdote - On February 13, 2009, the timestamp rolled past 1,234,567,890; developers threw small parties for the occasion.

Seconds or milliseconds

Mind the unit: many languages (JavaScript in particular) count in milliseconds, so with three extra digits. A timestamp "in the far future" or "back in 1970" is almost always a seconds/milliseconds mix-up.

Convert both ways

To go from a timestamp to a readable date - or the reverse - our timestamp converter does the translation locally, honoring the timezone you choose

🤓 Did you know? On 32-bit systems, the seconds counter overflows on January 19, 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC: the "Year 2038 problem," Unix time's own version of the Y2K bug.