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Time Services
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Time Services
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  1. Products
  2. Time Services
  3. Network Time Protocol
  4. User Guide

Using Cloudflare’s Time Service

Network Time Protocol (NTP) is an Internet protocol designed to synchronize time between computer systems communicating over unreliable and variable-latency network paths. Cloudflare offers its version of NTP for free so you can use our global Anycast network to synchronize time from our closest server.

To use our NTP server, change the time configuration in your device to point to time.cloudflare.com.

​​ MacOs

To have your Mac to synchronize time from time.cloudflare.com:

  1. Go to System Preferences.
  2. Go to Date & Time.
  3. Click the lock icon on the bottom left to make changes.
  4. Enter your password.
  5. Next to Set date and time automatically, enter time.cloudflare.com.

Screenshot of updating the Date & Time settings on machine running macOS

​​ Windows

To have your Windows machine synchronize time from time.cloudflare.com:

  1. Go to Control Panel.
  2. Go to Clock and Region.
  3. Click Date and Time.
  4. Go to the Internet Time tab.
  5. Click Change settings..
  6. For Server:, type time.cloudflare.com and click Update now.
  7. Click OK.

Screenshot of updating the Date and Time settings on machine running Windows

​​ Linux

Cloudflare’s time servers are included in pool.ntp.org which is the default time service for many Linux distributions and network appliances. If your NTP client is synchronizing from one of the below servers, you are already using Cloudflare’s time services.

To manually configure your NTP client to use our time service, please first refer to the documentation for your Linux distribution to determine which NTP client you are using and where the configuration files are stored.

For example:

Exact configuration will vary by Linux distribution, but below are some example configurations for popular clients:

​​ chrony

  1. Add time.cloudflare.com as a server in the configuration file on your system (e.g., /etc/chrony/chrony.conf)

    server time.cloudflare.com iburst

  2. Restart the chronyd service.

    systemctl restart chronyd

​​ systemd-timesyncd

  1. Add time.cloudflare.com to the [Time] section of the configuration file on your system (e.g., /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf)

    [Time]
NTP=time.cloudflare.com

  2. Restart the systemd-timesyncd service.

    systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd

​​ ntpd

  1. Add time.cloudflare.com as a server in the configuration file on your system (e.g., /etc/ntp.conf)

    server time.cloudflare.com iburst

  2. Restart the ntpd service.

    systemctl restart ntpd