Unix Timestamp 1500000000

What does the timestamp 1500000000 mean?

1,500,000,000 is one of those round, memorable Unix timestamps developers actually notice. It marks the round-number timestamp 1,500,000,000, landing on Friday, July 14, 2017 at 02:40:00 UTC. Below is everything you need to read, convert, and reuse this exact value.

The halfway-to-1.6-billion marker, 1,500,000,000, is a common placeholder in sample data and database seeds. Memorable round timestamps like this make it easy to spot off-by-1000 millisecond bugs.

Why 1500000000 matters

1,500,000,000 is the exact midpoint between the celebrated billennium of 2001 and the two-billion mark of 2033, and it arrived at 02:40:00 UTC on Friday, July 14, 2017, Bastille Day in France. It is one of the few round hundred-million values to land on a whole minute, because 1.5 billion divided by 86,400 leaves a remainder of exactly 9,600 seconds, or two hours and forty minutes. The digits also mark a practical boundary: timestamps beginning with 15 span July 14, 2017 to September 13, 2020, a stretch that covers most of the period when browsers finished retiring Flash and when TLS 1.3 was standardised. At this point Unix time had used just under 70 percent of its signed 32-bit range, with 20 years, 189 days left before the 2038 rollover. Developers reach for this value in seed data because it is realistic, recent and impossible to mistype without noticing, and because its milliseconds twin, 1,500,000,000,000, is equally easy to recognise. In hexadecimal it is 0x59682F00, and it is 17,361 full days after the epoch.

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 1,500,000,000 seconds is the same instant as 1,500,000,000,000 milliseconds — the form most programming languages expect, since JavaScript, Java, and many databases store time in milliseconds. Written out in full it is Friday, July 14, 2017 at 02:40:00 UTC, which is a Friday. In the two most common machine-readable formats it is 2017-07-14T02:40:00Z (ISO 8601) and Fri, 14 Jul 2017 02:40:00 +0000 (RFC 2822). All of these describe one and the same moment in time; they differ only in notation.

How to convert 1500000000 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(1500000000 * 1000).toUTCString(). Here are the equivalents in three common environments:

// JavaScript
const ts = 1500000000;
const date = new Date(ts * 1000);   // JS uses milliseconds
console.log(date.toUTCString());    // Fri, 14 Jul 2017 02:40:00 GMT
console.log(date.toISOString());    // 2017-07-14T02:40:00Z

# Python 3
from datetime import datetime, timezone
ts = 1500000000
print(datetime.fromtimestamp(ts, tz=timezone.utc))
# 2017-07-14 02:40:00+00:00

# Bash / GNU date
date -u -d @1500000000
# Fri, 14 Jul 2017 02:40:00 UTC

# macOS / BSD date
date -u -r 1500000000

If you would rather not write code at all, the Epoch Converter is pre-loaded with 1500000000 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 1500000000 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 1500000000 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:

1300000000 — Round Timestamp 1.3 BillionSunday, March 13, 20111400000000 — Round Timestamp 1.4 BillionTuesday, May 13, 20141577836800 — Start of 2020Wednesday, January 1, 20201600000000 — Round Timestamp 1.6 BillionSunday, September 13, 2020