While working with AWS SAM I ran into an error caused by the local system time of WSL being wrong.

wsl wrong time

In the above image notice that the date command outputs the hour being 4.

A call to worldtimeapi.org for my timezone shows the time being 12. Something is wrong.
World time API call formatted with JQ: curl -s "http://worldtimeapi.org/api/ip" | jq '.["datetime"]'

I attempted to re-configure WSL Ubuntu’s time with sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

That didn’t do the trick, it responded with below when the hour should be 12 PM:

Current default time zone: 'America/New_York'
Local time is now:      Mon Jul 13 16:21:15 EDT 2020.
Universal Time is now:  Mon Jul 13 20:21:15 UTC 2020.

The fix

It looks like there is a bug with WSL time handling.

To work around this I installed ntpdate and configured it then added the call to ntpdate to my .bashrc so it runs each time I login to WSL.

#Copy and paste this script into your terminal to permanently fix the date bring incorrect
sudo apt install ntpdate

#Only 
ntpdate -sb time.nist.gov

printf "\n#Run ntpdate to fix time bug in WSL \nntpdate -sb time.nist.gov\n" >> ~/.bashrc

#Verify the date is now correct
date

Update: Nov 3rd, 2020

This fix stopped working for after having working for several months. Here is my new fix curtsy of this Ask Ubuntu post.

#Update your time by hand
sudo date -s "$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com 2>&1 | grep Date: | cut -d' ' -f5-8)Z"

#Date to check the time is as expected
date

#Add time fix command to .bashrc so it runs every time you login
printf '\nsudo date -s \"$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com 2>&1 | grep Date: | cut -d" " -f5-8)Z\"
\n' >> ~/.bashrc