You mean a failure mode that is simply the time server saying "start of epoch, no offset"? There's a ton of ways for an offset to be zeroed by accident. Hell,

You mean a failure mode that is simply the time server saying "start of epoch, no offset"? There's a ton of ways for an offset to be zeroed by accident. Hell, two years ago I was setting up logstash, and was wondering why none of my front-end searches were getting loglines. Turns out the front-end was expecting four-digit years and I was saving two-digit years - by widening my search to include the year 14AD (rather than 2014), there were my loglines. I don't expect a vendor to intelligently handle this error and fix it for me, but I do expect a product not to irrevocably break itself if such an error does crop up.