“Goodbye Leap Second: Global Timekeepers Scrap Occasional Extra Second to Avoid Y2K-Style C” — what this page in the network covers. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) has voted to eliminate the leap second, a periodic one-second adjustment used to keep atomic time aligned with Earth's slowing rotation. The decision, made on Thursday, aims to prevent potential infrastructure failures similar to the Y2K bug scare. Leap seconds have been inserted 27 times since 1972, most recently in 2016, but they create complications for digital systems that require precise, uninterrupted timekeeping.
Tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta have long lobbied for the change, arguing that leap seconds can crash networks, disrupt financial transactions, and cause outages in cloud services. In 2012, a leap second caused major disruptions at Reddit, Mozilla, and Qantas Airways. This listing links straight to the original page, where the content is available in full.