PHP date() and time() ahead of server by about 3 minutes

Question

A couple days ago something changed and now PHP is returning a value in the future by about 3 minutes using the date() or time() functions, example output:

PHP script output

• php date("Ymd H:i:s"):2016-10-27 14:33:42

• time(): 1477604022

Server date output done a few seconds later

• Thu Oct 27 14:30:06 PDT 2016

Any idea why it would be offset by a couple minutes?

Answer 1

Figured it out, for some reason NTP (network time tool) stopped. We restarted NTP and the problem was fixed.