It doesn&#x27;t require a VM pause to cause a system freeze, an SMI interrupt can do that as well.<p>It doesn&#x27;t take a lot to have backwards time travel, NTP can do that for you as well in some bad configurations.<p>It&#x27;s very hard to rely on time in a distributed system. If you want a simple algorithm just don&#x27;t rely on time at all, use it for logs so a human can correlate things when debugging an issue but don&#x27;t assume time will flow at the same rate for all systems. Do use a monotonic clock always for internal timers, time does move backwards in systems.