Stuck in infinite loop trying to sync to NTP server on ESP8266 - c

Question

I am working on a project with an ESP8266 and trying to use a setClock function that, to my understanding, should configure the time based off of the NTP server defined in the 'TIMEZONE' variable. However, when I upload the program it gets stuck in the while loop because 'now' is getting set at 0 every iteration through the loop and gets incremented by 1 for every two iterations.
I'm assuming this means I am either defining TIMEZONE as the wrong NTP server (though I'm not sure how that would cause this issue) or the device isn't connecting to the NTP server properly.
This is where TIMEZONE is defined
// Pick a timezone from https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/blob/master/cores/esp8266/TZ.h
#define TIMEZONE TZ_America_Kentucky_Louisville
and this is the setClock function
void setClock() {
// General C time functions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_date_and_time_functions
configTime(TIMEZONE, "pool.ntp.org");
Serial.print("Waiting for NTP time sync: ");
time_t now = time(nullptr);
// 1546300800 = 01/01/2019 # 12:00am (UTC)
while (now < 1546300800) {
delay(500);
//Serial.print(".");
Serial.print(now);
Serial.print(\n);
now = time(nullptr);
}
Output
Attaching servo...done.
Initializing display...done.
Connecting to WiFi 'test'............done. IP 192.168.137.3
Waiting for NTP time sync: 4
4
5
5
6
6
7
I have verified that the ESP8266 is connected to the internet properly and the program also verifies it in the output.
I also tried commenting out the for loop to see if it would run anyway but the program says local time is 0:00 Jan 1 1970 which I know is just because the time is 0 seconds. This, however, causes the next part of my program to fail because it is using the time for x.509 validation.