A method and system for setting a time on a network appliance. The method may include attempting to establish a secure connection with a backend server using a certificate issued for a network appliance, and determining that an attempt to establish a secure connection has failed. The method may further include soliciting a response from one or more predefined servers, extracting time data from one or more responses received from the predefined server, and updating the time on the network appliance using the time data extracted from the received responses.