Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 17 submissions in the queue.
posted by janrinok on Tuesday November 22 2022, @09:10AM   Printer-friendly

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/21/23470759/leap-second-scrapped-2035-time-computer-chaos

A global panel of scientists and government representatives have voted to scrap leap seconds by 2035. The ad hoc time adjustment is occasionally inserted to account for the gradual slowdown of the Earth's rotation and has caused headaches for numerous tech companies over the years.

The leap second was introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) roughly every 21 months. As these seconds are irregular and hard to predict due to the varying speed of the Earth's rotation, they can disrupt systems that require precise timekeeping. Meta published a blog post earlier this year calling for leap seconds to be scrapped, highlighting that Reddit went down for around 40 minutes back in 2012 when a new leap second interfered with the company's servers. In 2017, Cloudflare blamed the leap second for its DNS service going down on New Year's Day, precisely at midnight UTC.

As reported by The New York Times, member states of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures almost unanimously voted in support of Resolution D at a meeting in Versailles, France, on Friday. Resolution D calls for UTC to go uninterrupted by leap seconds from 2035 until at least 2135, during which it's hoped that scientists can develop a better system for keeping atomic and astronomical time scales in sync.


Original Submission

 
This discussion was created by janrinok (52) for logged-in users only, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday December 03 2022, @07:01AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday December 03 2022, @07:01AM (#1280995) Journal

    Time seems to have destabilized. The server seems to be mostly back in November. Or was it the effect of a leap second? :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2