The Earth’s rotation is slowing down, ever so slightly. And while this isn’t cause for any real concern, it does mean that every few years we need to throw an extra second into our day to realign the planet’s atomic clocks. And computers cannot handle it.
The last time we included the leap second in the calendar year was in 2012, and it wreaked havoc across the Internet – with websites going down all over the world. LinkedIn, Reddit, Mozilla, Foursquare, Yelp and StumbleUpon all faltered when faced with the extra moment thrown in seemingly at random to their coding.
The sites use Network Time Protocal (NTP) to align their systems to the world’s atomic clocks, and when it sees the same second appearing in a row, a logical error is observed. While simple solutions can fix it, not everyone gets the message in time, and some websites go down as the number of seconds goes up.
In the UK, the Telegraph reports that there is a growing debate about whether the extra second should still be added to the calendar.
This year’s second is the 26th one we’ve added since the International Earth Rotation Service started crunching the numbers in 1972. Until 1979, a leap second was added every year, and six more times in the 1980s. This year’s second, though, is only the fourth since 1999.
The Paris-based organisation in charge of figuring out when the clocks are running slow is being criticised by US authorities, who say modern and everyday technology is being needlessly affected.
These US lobbyists claim that "precisely timed money transactions could go astray or vehicles could be sent tens of metres out of position if they are a second out in their measurement of time."
The International Earth Rotation Service has responded by saying that failing to add the extra leap second could ultimately come to redefine our entire notion of the concept of a day.
The Telegraph also reports that experts fear once this link is broken, it could never be repaired; while the Earth’s timekeeping systems can be changed to accommodate leap seconds, adjusting for a minute or hour around the globe could be impossible to achieve.
