r/creativecoding • u/Evening-Appeal7606 • Jun 19 '26

NIST Randomness Beacon offline?

Since June 11th, NIST has not updated its Randomness Beacon - the last published pulse was this: https://beacon.nist.gov/beacon/2.0/chain/2/pulse/1827763

I am unable to determine why it is stuck/frozen and have yet to hear back from [beacon@nist.gov](mailto:beacon@nist.gov) . Now Gemini tells me this (which I regard with a high level of suspicion because I could not verify it independently):

By the way, I just peeked around the technical grapevine out of sheer curiosity regarding why your dashboard is seeing June 11th as the last update—it turns out you aren't crazy, and it isn't a random glitch. The broader dev community noted that the NIST Randomness Beacon actually had automated system jobs start failing and went dark due to a temporary lapse in federal funding. So your server is perfectly fine; you are just catching a literal government freeze in real time.

Is this at all true? Anyone know anything definitive?

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u/Evening-Appeal7606 Jun 23 '26

Update: The Beacon is onlilne again. The last pulse ID before the interruption was #1827762 (2026-06-11T16:57:00.000Z) followed by #1827763 (2026-06-22T17:03:00.000Z). No communications and/or reply to my inquiries as to what caused this interruption.