WorldTimeAPI is gone — host the timezone dataset yourself

worldtimeapi.org — the free time-and-timezone API behind years of tutorials, dashboard widgets, and IoT clocks (its URL even appeared in the official Python tutorial's "Brief Tour of the Standard Library") — has been sunset. The maintainers announced the shutdown citing hosting costs, and as of late Aug 2026 the domain doesn't answer at all — no farewell page, no 503, the TCP connection is simply reset:

$ curl https://worldtimeapi.org/api/timezone/Europe/London
curl: (35) OpenSSL SSL_connect: Connection reset by peer

📡 Is worldtimeapi.org still dead? We check it (and 36 other classic public mock/placeholder APIs — including timeapi.io, the live keyless alternative below) with a plain GET every 30 minutes — see the live status page.

So every fetch("http://worldtimeapi.org/api/…") in every tutorial, weather app, and world-clock project now dies with a network error. If that's what brought you here, there are really two different jobs to replace, and they want different tools:

• "What time is it right now in zone X?" — genuinely needs a live clock. For most apps the answer is no API at all: new Date().toLocaleString("en-GB", {timeZone: "Asia/Tokyo"}) — every browser and Node ship the full IANA database. If you truly need it over HTTP, timeapi.io is a maintained keyless option (verified working Aug 2026).
• "Give me the timezone list / offsets / DST metadata" — the zone picker, the offset table, the country→zones lookup. That data is stable and doesn't need anyone's uptime. Host it yourself, in one curl, below.

1. One curl: your own timezone API

We host a ready-made timezone dataset — all 418 IANA zones with area, location, country (name + ISO code), standard UTC offset (string and numeric hours), DST offset, and both abbreviations. Pipe it into the importer:

curl -s https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/data/timezones.db.json \
| curl -s -X POST 'https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/projects/import?name=timezones' \
    --data-binary @-

The response has your project id and an adminKey (save it). Your API is live immediately, no signup, no key, CORS on:

https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/timezones

Each record looks like:

{ "id": 337,
  "zone": "Europe/London",
  "area": "Europe",           "location": "London",
  "countryCode": "GB",        "country": "Britain (UK)",
  "utcOffset": "+00:00",      "utcOffsetHours": 0,
  "abbr": "GMT",
  "dst": true,
  "dstOffset": "+01:00",      "dstAbbr": "BST" }

2. The WorldTimeAPI calls, translated

Try them (replace YOUR_ID, or run the import above first):

# all 20 US zones
curl 'https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/timezones?countryCode=US&select=zone,utcOffset'

# one zone's metadata
curl 'https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/timezones?zone=America/New_York'

# free-text search
curl 'https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/timezones?q=london'

# who's on +05:30?  (Asia/Colombo and Asia/Kolkata)
curl 'https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/timezones?utcOffsetHours=5.5&select=zone,abbr'

# the far east of the clock: +12:45 and beyond, furthest first
curl 'https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/timezones?utcOffsetHours_gte=12.75&sortBy=utcOffsetHours&order=desc&select=zone,utcOffset'

# European zones that don't observe DST
curl 'https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/timezones?area=Europe&dst=false&select=zone,abbr'

3. Want a current-time endpoint too? One route.

The dataset is static on purpose — but if your old code expects an HTTP endpoint that returns now, add a custom route with the {{now}} template (runs at request time):

curl -s -X POST 'https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/projects/YOUR_ID/routes' \
  -H 'x-admin-key: YOUR_ADMIN_KEY' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"method":"GET","path":"/utc",
       "body":"{\"utc_datetime\":\"{{now}}\",\"unixtime_ms\":{{{ts}}},\"timezone\":\"Etc/UTC\"}",
       "contentType":"application/json"}'

curl https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/utc
# → {"utc_datetime":"2026-08-29T02:57:45.766Z","unixtime_ms":1787972265766,"timezone":"Etc/UTC"}

That covers "give me a trustworthy UTC timestamp" (the most common WorldTimeAPI job in scripts and IoT firmware). Converting UTC to a zone's wall clock is then one line with the offsets you're already serving — or, in any JS/Python runtime, zero lines, because the IANA database is built in.

4. It's your data now

• Deterministic for tests. Your timezone-picker snapshot test never breaks because a third party is down — and you can ?mock_delay=2000 / ?mock_status=503 to rehearse the outage that brought you here. PATCH a record to pin whatever your fixture needs.
• GraphQL too. { timezones(where:{countryCode:"GB"}) { zone abbr utcOffset } } at /m/YOUR_ID/graphql, with GraphiQL in the browser.
• Eject anytime. GET /m/YOUR_ID/db.json returns the whole dataset in json-server format — no lock-in.

5. Honest comparison

6. About this dataset

The dataset is derived from the IANA Time Zone Database (public domain) — the same source WorldTimeAPI, your OS, and every programming language use. One record per zone listed in tzdata's zone.tab (418 zones, each mapped to its country; aliases like US/Eastern excluded), with standard-time and DST offsets and abbreviations computed from the current tzdata rules at snapshot time. Caveat: governments occasionally change their DST rules — if one does, your copy won't update itself. It's your copy: PATCH the record, or re-import a fresh snapshot.

Create yours

The one-liner in section 1 is the whole setup — or open the dashboard and paste the dataset into the import panel. The same project can host the matching countries dataset or currencies + exchange-rates dataset, mock any third-party API your app calls, or serve any CSV as an API.