June Will Be 1 Second Longer

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in internet on (#9XMS)
story imageIt's a dreaded day for many Internet companies: On June 30, an extra second will be added to the clock, creating the potential to wreak havoc on computer systems not equipped to handle the change. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) announced an extra second will be added at the end of June to account for a discrepancy between Earth's rotation and the atomic clock. The extra second will be added as the clock strikes midnight universal time, meaning the extra second will come for people in the United States at 8 p.m. EDT. There have been 25 instances since 1972 of an extra second being added.

It's possible that programs not equipped to handle the extra second could have an issue. When the last leap second was added on June 30, 2012, it caused issues with a number of websites, including LinkedIn and Yelp. Mozilla, Reddit and Foursquare all experienced system crashes. Qantas was hard hit, too, with a failure of its check-in system creating flight delays across the network.

Re: A bit embarrassing... software developer for years.... (Score: 1)

by seriously@pipedot.org on 2015-05-28 11:57 (#9Y0H)

Mmmh, I agree, in Google's case it seems more about synchronisation of their multiple machines across their multiple datacenters (and locking issues that go with it). But a bit of googling showed some other more crash-like reports:

http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/07/03/a-story-of-leaping-seconds/
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1203.1/04598.html
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=6b43ae8a619d17c4935c3320d2ef9e92bdeed05d
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/154713

In this case, the "2012 crash", it was kernel-related (something about a multi-CPU race inside the kernel that caused lock issues if I get this right), so not really a problem that you could do anything to avoid in userland.

Now if you're using *BSD, of course, you're most certainly safe ;)
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