⚛️ Why Atomic Clocks, Earthquakes 🌍, and $2 Crystals 💎 Make You Lose Data 💸
The 87-Millisecond Gap Your database says it’s 10:00:00.000. The atomic clock in Colorado says it’s 10:00:00.087. The difference that had been made? A melting glacier in Greenland, an earthquake in Chile, and a $2 quartz crystal vibrating inside your server. Somewhere in that 87-millisecond gap, a $50,000 transaction just disappeared from your revenue report. Here’s what happened: You processed the same Kafka topic twice. Same code, same data, same time range. First run reported $10.2M in transactions. Second run reported $11.4M. You were missing $1.2M worth of payments, and nobody noticed for three months. ...