Introduction
Active Servers
- Africa 118
- Antarctica 2
- Asia 601
- Europe 3810
- North America 1279
- Oceania 230
- South America 92
- Global 5382
- All Pool Servers 6104
The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers providing reliable, easy to use NTP service for millions of clients.
The pool is being used by hundreds of millions of systems around the world. It's the default "time server" for most of the major Linux distributions and many networked appliances (see information for vendors).
Because of the large number of users we are in need of more servers. If you have a server with a static IP address always available on the Internet, please consider adding it to the system.
The project is maintained and developed by Ask Bjørn Hansen and a great group of contributors on the project community forum. The source code for the system is available.
Hosting and bandwidth for the "hub" servers are provided by Equinix and Netactuate.
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February 22, 2026
Infrastructure Migration
The NTP Pool is migrating its central infrastructure from Equinix Metal to two smaller, globally distributed clusters. Equinix Metal is sunsetting later this year, so the project must move.
Equinix Metal — originally Packet — hosted the NTP Pool’s central infrastructure for almost seven years. The web application, databases, DNS zone building, monitoring pipelines, observability, development and beta environments all ran there. It was the backbone that kept the entire pool management system running.
The relationship started with Packet, whose team went out of their way to help during an emergency migration in 2019. Equinix continued that same level of support after acquiring Packet. Their generosity made it possible for a volunteer-run project to operate infrastructure at a scale that would otherwise be out of reach. We would gladly have stayed — Equinix Metal was an excellent home for the project.
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July 27, 2025
NTP Pool Monitoring v4
The NTP Pool is upgrading its monitoring system to support more monitors and provide better coverage for all servers. The current monitoring system (v2) supports a smaller number of monitors with just “active” and “testing” states. The new monitoring system (v4) can support many more monitors, makes them easier to provision and operate, and introduces a new “candidate” state for better resource management.
Key Improvements in v4
- Expanded capacity: Support for significantly more monitoring nodes worldwide
- Better coverage: Enhanced geographic distribution and network diversity
- New candidate state: Improves resource allocation and provides backup monitoring coverage
- Easier operations: Simplified setup and management for monitor operators
With the new monitoring infrastructure, we’ll have a world-class globally distributed monitoring system to match the unparalleled NTP service. The monitoring system will better test local conditions across the world and give us new and better tools to diagnose network problems across countries and networks.
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March 20, 2023
NTP Pool Monitoring v2
This weekend the system that monitors the NTP servers in the NTP Pool got a major overhaul!
NTP servers are now monitored from a number of monitors across the world, usually closer to the server than the single monitor was before.
One of the most frustrating things about operating an NTP server in the NTP Pool was how random network issues far away from the server would impact the score. Sometimes cause an email to be sent to the operator about potential problems.
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March 12, 2023
The NTP Pool Project turns 20
This year the NTP Pool Project has been serving time to the world for 20 years!
Trillions and trillions of DNS requests have been served to billions of clients, with the NTP requests handled by thousands of NTP servers across the world day and night.
Development on the project ebbs and flows, but maintenance and upgrades on the production infrastructure is consistent – and constant.
Our community is active; and the NTP server operators even more so with almost 2,000 operators managing the 3,000 IPv4 NTP IPs and 1,600 IPv6 IPs active in the system.
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May 25, 2020
Website cookie policy
The main website (www.ntppool.org / www.pool.ntp.org) doesn’t set any browser cookies. Some access logs are generated strictly for diagnostics purposes. No long term storage or analytics on user behavior is attempted.
The manage website (manage.ntppool.org) sets a cookie on login to track authentication. The site also keeps a record of the account information you provide and NTP server IPs that are registered. We try hard to not keep any information that’s not essential for operating the system.
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Links
- Terms of service
- NTP home - the website about ntp
- The NTP Pool DNS server uses GeoIP data from MaxMind to help choose an NTP server from the Pool.
- Meinberg, makers of incredibly fine time server systems.
- The Public servers abuse and the Fixing the NTP server abuse problem threads on the comp.protocols.time.ntp newsgroup have caused this project to be started.