Science & Technology

'Leap second' could wreak havoc online

By T.K. Randall
January 7, 2015 ·  15 comments

An extra second will be added at the end of June. Image Credit: sxc.hu The concept of a leap year, when an extra day is added to the calendar to help keep it synchronized with the seasonal year, is something that most people will be familiar with, however the idea of a leap second is not quite so commonplace.

Officials at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) in Paris this week announced that an extra second would be added to the clock at the end of June of this year. The second will come in to effect at 23:59:59 so that the following month of July will be slightly delayed.

[google]First introduced in 1972, the leap second was designed to correct minor desynchronizations between the time defined by the Earth's rotation and that derived from an average of atomic clock times.

Unfortunately however the addition of this extra second has the potential to cause problems on the Internet. When the last leap second was added back in 2012, big websites such as Gizmodo, Reddit and StumbleUpon all experienced issues because their servers were unable to handle the change.

While it's likely that most server software will have now been updated to avoid this happening again there's still a chance that we'll see a few disruptions online at the beginning of July.

Source: CBS News | Comments (15)

Tags: Leap Second, Time, Internet