Incident 2026-09-17: a wrong Windows clock broke calls and media keys while
the server answered 200 to everything, with no hint in the UI.
Measurement needs no extra requests and no CORS-exposed headers: every live
event carries origin_server_ts and unsigned.age (our server's now − ts at
response time), so localTimestamp − origin_server_ts is the skew. Only
RoomEvent.Timeline live events count (cache replays have stale age and are
already flagged liveEvent=false by the SDK); the initial network sync
qualifies, so a wrong clock is flagged within seconds of startup. Median of
the last 5 samples, ≥3 needed; warn at |skew| > 30 s, clear below 15 s.
UI: a banner in the sync-status slot — "Your computer's clock is 14 minutes
ahead of the server. Encrypted messages and voice calls will fail until it is
fixed." with a per-OS How-to-fix hint and Dismiss for 24 h — plus the same
line in the call status bar while in a call. Never auto-corrects anything.
Unit-tested (median, hysteresis, stale-age rejection, wording); verified
headless with Playwright's clock skewed +14 min and −3 h (banner, hint,
in-call line, dismiss) and in sync (nothing shown).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PPmy3tPq869XDW4njjVaKA
