Unix Timestamp 1300000000

What does the timestamp 1300000000 mean?

1,300,000,000 is one of those round, memorable Unix timestamps developers actually notice. It marks the round-number timestamp 1,300,000,000, landing on Sunday, March 13, 2011 at 07:06:40 UTC. Below is everything you need to read, convert, and reuse this exact value.

Round billion-and-hundred-million timestamps are convenient reference points for testing and for reasoning about how far into the Unix era a given second falls. This one sits in early 2011.

Why 1300000000 matters

Each step of 100,000,000 seconds is 1,157 days and 16 hours, a little over three years and two months, so the round hundred-million values form a coarse ruler laid along the Unix era: 1.2 billion fell on January 10, 2008, 1.3 billion on March 13, 2011, 1.4 billion on May 13, 2014. This one arrived at 07:06:40 UTC on a Sunday, two days after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, so logs, news archives and status pages from that weekend are full of timestamps just either side of it. That makes it a useful mental anchor: any ten-digit timestamp beginning with 130 is from the spring of 2011. It is also 15,046 full days after the epoch, about 41 years, 71 days. Round values like this are popular as boundaries in test data because they are trivially easy to type correctly, and any slip (a dropped zero, an extra digit) produces a wildly different date that is easy to notice. In hexadecimal it is 0x4D7C6D00, the form you might meet in a binary file header or a packet capture, where a timestamp is stored as four raw bytes rather than as text.

The exact value, every way you need it

A Unix timestamp is a single integer: the count of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch (midnight UTC on January 1, 1970), ignoring leap seconds. The value 1,300,000,000 seconds is the same instant as 1,300,000,000,000 milliseconds — the form most programming languages expect, since JavaScript, Java, and many databases store time in milliseconds. Written out in full it is Sunday, March 13, 2011 at 07:06:40 UTC, which is a Sunday. In the two most common machine-readable formats it is 2011-03-13T07:06:40Z (ISO 8601) and Sun, 13 Mar 2011 07:06:40 +0000 (RFC 2822). All of these describe one and the same moment in time; they differ only in notation.

How to convert 1300000000 in code

Turning this timestamp into a human-readable date takes a single expression in most languages. In JavaScript, remember to multiply by 1000 because Date works in milliseconds: new Date(1300000000 * 1000).toUTCString(). Here are the equivalents in three common environments:

// JavaScript
const ts = 1300000000;
const date = new Date(ts * 1000);   // JS uses milliseconds
console.log(date.toUTCString());    // Sun, 13 Mar 2011 07:06:40 GMT
console.log(date.toISOString());    // 2011-03-13T07:06:40Z

# Python 3
from datetime import datetime, timezone
ts = 1300000000
print(datetime.fromtimestamp(ts, tz=timezone.utc))
# 2011-03-13 07:06:40+00:00

# Bash / GNU date
date -u -d @1300000000
# Sun, 13 Mar 2011 07:06:40 UTC

# macOS / BSD date
date -u -r 1300000000

If you would rather not write code at all, the Epoch Converter is pre-loaded with 1300000000 so you can see it converted instantly and tweak the value live.

How long ago (or how far away) is it?

The headline near the top of this page updates every time you load it, computing the gap between 1300000000 and your current clock in real time so it never goes stale. To measure the span between this timestamp and any other date precisely — in years, months, weeks, days, or business days — use the Date Duration Calculator. To watch a future moment tick down second by second, the Countdown Timer can target this exact instant.

Why timestamps matter

Storing time as a plain integer of seconds is wonderfully unambiguous: there is no time zone, no daylight saving, and no locale to misinterpret. Two servers anywhere on Earth agree on what 1300000000 means. That is why logs, databases, JWTs, file metadata, and APIs lean on Unix time so heavily. The trade-off is that the number is not human-friendly at a glance — which is exactly the gap a reference like this page fills.

Related timestamps

Other notable Unix timestamps worth a look:

1111111111 — Repdigit Timestamp 1111111111Friday, March 18, 20051234567890 — The 1234567890 TimestampFriday, February 13, 20091400000000 — Round Timestamp 1.4 BillionTuesday, May 13, 20141500000000 — Round Timestamp 1.5 BillionFriday, July 14, 2017