Come funziona
A Unix timestamp counts time since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970, excluding leap seconds — which means it is not strictly a count of elapsed seconds, and the difference matters only to astronomers and to anyone comparing it against a monotonic clock. It is timezone-free by construction, which is its virtue: a timestamp means the same instant everywhere, and a timezone is applied only when it is rendered. Most of the confusion around timestamps comes from forgetting that the number carries no zone information at all.
The unit is the single most common source of bugs. Unix time is conventionally seconds, but JavaScript's Date constructor and most mobile platforms use milliseconds, so a value of 1700000000 interpreted as milliseconds lands in January 1970 and one of 1700000000000 interpreted as seconds lands tens of thousands of years in the future. Both failures are immediately visible here, and the unit is detected from the magnitude of the input — a ten-digit number is seconds, a thirteen-digit number is milliseconds — with the choice overridable in either direction.
The 2038 problem is the other limit worth knowing. A signed 32-bit integer of seconds overflows on 19 January 2038, and any system storing timestamps that way — including many embedded devices, older databases and C code using time_t on 32-bit platforms — will wrap to a negative value and report a date in 1901. The fix is a 64-bit integer, which these days is universal in new code but far from universal in the field. This tool renders dates beyond 2038 correctly because it uses 64-bit arithmetic throughout.
Rendering is where timezones enter. The same instant is 09:00 in London in winter and 10:00 in summer, and the offset is not a constant — it depends on daylight saving rules that governments change with little notice. The converter uses the browser's own timezone database, which is the same data that keeps your operating system clock correct, so it reflects historical and announced rule changes rather than a hardcoded offset table. The IANA timezone names such as Europe/London or America/New_York are the correct identifiers; abbreviations like EST or CST are ambiguous and should be avoided in any system that stores or exchanges times.
Casi d'uso comuni
- Read a timestamp from a database row or a log line as an actual date.
- Generate a timestamp for a query range or a cache expiry header.
- Check whether an API's exp or iat field refers to a time in the past.
- Confirm what time an event happened in a colleague's timezone rather than your own.
- Verify that a system is storing seconds rather than milliseconds before a migration.
- Convert a date to an ISO 8601 string for a log format or a JSON field.
Ultimo aggiornamento: 2026-10-14 — il corpo dell'articolo è mostrato in inglese; l'interfaccia è tradotta.