Wrong date and time after battery died

Hi, all.

Hoping you can help because I’m at the end of my tether.

I have a 14” M1 MacBook Pro. It was unused through most of December, so was asleep, uncharged. I’ve gone to use it today and the battery was dead. After plugging it in and turning it on, the date and clock are out by over a month. Today’s date is 13th January 2022 and the date on the MacBook is 8th December 2021.

The Timezone is set automatically, using time.apple.com. The location is set automatically to London. Location services are enabled for clock setting.

I have tried:

1. Restarting
2. Updating Monterey (now the latest version)
3. DNS Flush
4. Changing network
5. Changing network locations
6. Booting into safe mode (shows the same date)
7. Clearing browser cache
8. Disk first aid (just in case)

None of that has resolved the issue. I’ve clicked the Timezone tick boxes in different orders, mostly in frustration. In the past, I’d have reset the NVRAM, but you can’t do that with M1.

I’m currently doing a fresh install of Monterey through recovery mode in the hope it’ll fix it.

In the meantime, does anyone have any other ideas? This is incredibly frustrating!

Thank you,

Ste.