In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin experienced a denial-of-service flood targeting its Internet time server, traced to flawed SNTP clients in Netgear routers that were sending malformed requests. Netgear cooperated with the university to develop firmware fixes for affected products and the incident prompted discussion of network operational responses and internet best practices clarification.
Before NTP became standard in 1988, computers used simpler Time (RFC 868) and Daytime (RFC 867) protocols to sync clocks over networks via port 37, transmitting time as a 32-bit number or human-readable text. These protocols were efficient for 1980s bandwidth constraints but lacked precision, timestamping, and faced a Y2K36 overflow problem; NIST still operates these services today with a custom response format.