Countdown Timer

How to create a countdown

1. Type an Event name (optional), such as “Summer holidays” or “Product launch”.
2. Pick the Date and the Time of the event, in your own time zone. If you leave the time empty, the countdown targets midnight at the start of that day.
3. Click Start countdown. The days, hours, minutes and seconds left are shown in large digits and update every second.
4. To share it, click Copy share link and paste the link in a message, an email or a chat. Anyone who opens it sees the same countdown.

When you open this tool without a link, it counts down to the next New Year’s Day, at midnight in your time zone.

How the shareable link works

The target date and the event name are stored in the link itself, after the # sign, for example #t=1798758000&n=New+Year. The number is a Unix timestamp: the target moment expressed in seconds since January 1, 1970, UTC. When the page opens, your browser reads this part of the address and starts the countdown. The part after # is never sent to a server, so there is no account, no database and no expiry: the link keeps working as long as you keep it.

Because the link stores an exact moment rather than a clock time, the countdown reaches zero at the same instant for everyone. The target date is then shown in each visitor’s own time zone. If you create a countdown to 9:00 in Paris and send it to a friend in Montreal, they will see 3:00 on the same day, and both counters will hit zero together. That’s what you want for a live event, a webinar or a product launch. For something local to each person, like midnight on New Year’s Eve, each person can create their own countdown.

Reading the countdown

The counter displays whole days, then hours, minutes and seconds. Below the digits, the tool also gives the total remaining time in days, hours or minutes, which is handy for statements like “only 1,000 hours to go”. Once the moment has passed, the counter doesn’t stop at zero: it counts the time elapsed since the event, so a shared link still says something useful afterwards.

The remaining time is recalculated from your device’s clock several times a second, rather than by counting ticks, so it stays accurate even if the tab was in the background or your computer went to sleep. If your device’s clock is wrong, the countdown will be wrong by the same amount.

Ideas for countdowns

• Holidays, birthdays, weddings and anniversaries.
• Exams, application deadlines and tax filing dates.
• Product launches, sales, live streams and online events.
• Retirement, the end of a project or the arrival of a baby.