Time-triggered architectures form an important component of many distributed computing platforms for safety-critical real-time applications such as avionics and automotive control systems. TTA, FlexRay, and TTCAN are examples of such time-triggered architectures that have been popular in recent times. These architectures involve a number of algorithms for synchronizing a set of distributed computing nodes for meaningful exchange of data among them. The algorithms include a startup algorithm whose job is to integrate one or more nodes into the group of communicating nodes. The startup algorithm runs on every node when the system is powered up, and again after a failure occurs. Some critical issues need to be considered in the design of the startup algorithms, for example, the algorithms should be robust under reasonable assumptions of failures of nodes and channels. The safety-critical nature of the applications where these algorithms are used demands rigorous verification of these algorithms, and there have been numerous attempts to use formal verification techniques for this purpose. This paper focuses on various formal verification efforts carried out for ensuring the correctness of the startup algorithms. In particular, the verification of different startup algorithms used in three time-triggered architectures, TTA, FlexRay, and TTCAN, is studied, compared, and contrasted. Besides presenting the various verification approaches for these algorithms, the gaps and possible improvements on the verification efforts are also indicated.