Ask HN: NIST Randomness Beacon Interruption?
A Hacker News user reported an unannounced, unacknowledged outage of the NIST Randomness Beacon from June 11 to June 22, 2026, and received no response from NIST after reaching out. The user also noted that Google's Gemini hallucinated an unsubstantiated explanation involving a government shutdown. They are asking the community for accurate information about the cause.
Background
- The NIST Randomness Beacon is a public service run by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that publishes a new, unpredictable random number every 60 seconds. It is widely used in cryptography, scientific research, smart contracts, and auditing — any application that needs a trusted, verifiable source of randomness that the public can rely on.
- The interruption noted here ran for about 11 days in June 2026 (pulse IDs 1827762 to 1827763). Because the Beacon provides a continuous chain of signed random values, an unannounced gap of this length is unusual and potentially concerning for systems that depend on it.
- The user could not get a response from NIST via email or social media. They also note that Google's Gemini chatbot fabricated a plausible-sounding explanation (a government shutdown) without evidence.
- The underlying concern: if a critical public infrastructure service goes dark with no communication, users wonder whether it was a technical failure, a political event, or something else — and whether they can continue to trust the service going forward.