Yes, many servers don’t expose Date to browsers (Access-Control-Expose-Headers), so you can’t read it cross-origin. Also, CDNs/proxies can cache or rewrite headers, my goal was a boring, local /time on the same gateway the tech is testing. Another thing was that Date is seconds-resolution, I want ms and a stable JSON shape. I have found Cloudflare trace to be handy in past, but it’s not my box, it may rate-limit, and adds an extra network hop. For the core question "Is it me or the edge box" I wanted the box itself to answer.