'uptime' gets its data from the file /etc/utmp. It is possible that the file has been corrupted.
Also since we changed to standard time:
If boot time was Saturday Nov 5, 2011 at 23:59.Daylight savings time.
At 8 am Sunday Nov 6 is uptime 8 hours or 9 hours?
Also your premise that uptime starts when /etc/cron starts is false.
If cron is restarted, or if there is maintenance done in single user mode the the times will be different.
I found another thread on this site where a guy had an issue where the users are logged in longer than the uptime. The replies he got was also todo with the utmp and wtmp files