Thread:BEJT/@comment-27496405-20170830154244/@comment-26838855-20171203135513

Gerisama wrote: Although it was not timetravel, it was a slow rollback, meanwhile Kaecilius and his zealots were fighting strange, and it was done by  one of the most powerful object in the MCU Multiverse... I took it like the apple, on a grand scale for the whole city. When Strange uses the gem on the apple, he is not affecting time around it - that passes normally. He is only rolling the apple back and forth through its own timeline, its own existence.

So time everywhere else except in the city in Hong Kong passes normally. If someone were sitting outside the field of the gem's power, they could watch everything unfold (like the weird Benedict Cumberbatch "news report" non-canon videos). They would see the city destroyed, and then rolled back in its own time. But because it encapsulated the whole city, very few people would know of any phenomenon, and so only rumours leaked out - as mentioned in AoS 405. The citizens wouldn't know anything happened, but would find that their clocks are half an hour behind the rest of the world.