Time’s up: the leap second is being scrapped
by Jess Weatherbed from The Verge - All Posts on (#662A2)
Leap seconds depend entirely on how quickly the Earth spins, which can be a nightmare for managing technology hardware infrastructures. (Pictured: the World Time Clock in Berlin.) | Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images 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...