Leap Second Bug Proves That One Extra Second Can Create Havoc

The Leap Second Bug hit major websites like Reddit, Foursquare, Mozilla, Gawker among others on Saturday evening (around 5 pm Pacific time) creating minor glitches. Some sites even experienced down time just because one “leap second” was added to the world’s atomic clocks. Puzzled? Well, Atomic clocks keep the precise official times. And these clocks were kept on hold for one second on Saturday so that they could sync with rotation of the earth. But, the software platforms like Linux and Java couldn't keep up with it. The Network Time Protocol that they use to keep themselves aligned with atomic clocks didn’t know how to handle the situation.

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This is the 25th leap second since 1972, and while there have been no problems so far, scientists still caution that adding an extra second could have serious consequences. Only Google seemed to have precautionary measures for this situation. Google's <a href="https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping-seconds.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Official Google Blog: Time, technology and leaping seconds</a> from last year tell us how it deals with these leap seconds. They gradually add milliseconds to their system clocks well before the leap second arrives and call this technique as “leap smear". So much due to an extra second!

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