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martyb and Phoenix666 wrote:

Phys.org (among many other sites) is reporting on a leap second being added before the end of 2016:

As if 2016 has not been long enough, the year's dying minute will last an extra second to make up for time lost to Earth's slowing rotation, timekeepers say.

Countries that use Coordinated Universal Time—several West African nations, Britain, Ireland and Iceland—will add the leap second during the midnight countdown to 2017—making the year's final minute 61 seconds long.

For others, the timing will be determined by the time zone they live in, relative to UTC.

"This extra second, or leap second, makes it possible to align astronomical time, which is irregular and determined by Earth's rotation, with UTC which is extremely stable and has been determined by atomic clocks since 1967," the Paris Observatory said in a statement.

The observatory houses the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), responsible for synchronising time.

"The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be: 2016 December 31 23h 59m 59s, 2016 December 31 23h 59m 60s, 2017 January 1, 0h 0m 0s," the IERS website states.

Here is the original IERS announcement. There have been times in the past when the addition of a leap-second caused havoc — it is non-trivial to update the clocks on all the systems in an organization at the same time. When activity "A" happens before activity "B", but because of inconsistent system clocks the timestamps imply otherwise, things can go sideways in a hurry.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2