Time’s up: the leap second is being scrapped


A photo taken on October 19th, 2021, shows the landmark Television Tower (Fernsehturm, L) and the World Time Clock (Weltzeituhr) in Berlin.
Leap seconds rely solely on how rapidly the Earth spins, which could be a nightmare for managing expertise {hardware} infrastructures. (Pictured: the World Time Clock in Berlin.) | Photograph by INA FASSBENDER/AFP by way of Getty Photographs

A world panel of scientists and authorities representatives have voted to scrap leap seconds by 2035. The advert hoc time adjustment is often inserted to account for the gradual slowdown of the Earth’s rotation and has prompted complications for quite a few tech firms over time.

The leap second was launched in 1972 as a option to modify Coordinated Common Time (UTC) roughly each 21 months. As these seconds are irregular and arduous to foretell because of the various velocity of the Earth’s rotation, they’ll disrupt programs that require exact timekeeping. Meta printed a weblog submit earlier this yr calling for leap seconds to be scrapped, highlighting that Reddit went down for round 40 minutes again in 2012 when a brand new leap second…

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