Two-factor auth code kept failing on my router, took 6 hours to figure out why

I spent 6 hours last Tuesday locked out of my home router's admin panel because the 2FA code kept getting rejected, even though I was copying it straight from my phone. Turned out my router's clock was off by 4 minutes, so the codes expired before I could enter them. Has anyone else had a device where the time sync silently breaks and makes 2FA useless?

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joseph_torres24d ago

Wait, did you check if the clock sync setting was actually turned on, or did it just quietly stop working? I had the same thing happen with an old NAS I use for backups, the time was off by like 7 minutes and every authenticator app on my phone said no. I finally noticed the device's system log showed the NTP server as unreachable for weeks, but it never gave me a warning. The worst part was I had to dig through the manual just to find the time settings buried under some advanced menu. Once I forced it to sync manually, the codes worked instantly. It's scary how a tiny setting like that can just break silently and ruin your whole afternoon.