What is epoch time? The Unix epoch (or Unix time or POSIX time or Unix timestamp) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT), not counting leap seconds (in ISO 8601: 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z). Literally speaking the epoch is Unix time 0 (midnight 1/1/1970), but 'epoch' is often used as a synonym for 'Unix time'. Many Unix systems store epoch dates as a signed..