The UNIX timestamp is the number of seconds (or milliseconds) elapsed since an absolute point in time, midnight of Jan 1 1970 in UTC time. (UTC is Greenwich Mean Time without Daylight Savings time adjustments.) Regardless of your time zone, the UNIX timestamp represents a moment that is the same everywhere.

Is Unix time universal?

No. By definition, it represents UTC time zone. So a moment in Unix time means the same simultaneous moment in Auckland, Paris, and Montréal. The UT in UTC means “Universal Time”.

Is Unix time UTC?

Unix time is a way of representing a timestamp by representing the time as the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. One of the primary benefits of using Unix time is that it can be represented as an integer making it easier to parse and use across different systems.