‘Leap second’ wreaks Internet havoc

US: An adjustment of a mere second in the official global clock sent dozens of websites crashing in an incident reminiscent of the Y2K bug over a decade ago.

The “leap second” was added to the Coordinated Universal Time to adjust clocks to the earth's rotation the night of June 30, delaying for one second the transition to July 1. The extra second was too much for some software to handle.

Reddit, a social news network, posted a Twitter message, saying “We are having some Java/Cassandra issues related to the leap second.”

A later message by Reddit attempted to make fun of the issue: “You ever wish you had an extra second or two? This is not one of those times.” Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, also had problems.

Google went in prepared for the latest of 25 leap seconds added since 1972, having identified problems in 2008 and developing “one of our coolest workarounds.” “The solution we came up with came to be known as the 'leap smear,'” Google engineer Christopher Pascoe said in posting last year.

We modified our internal NTP servers to gradually add a couple of milliseconds to every update... Google engineers developing code don't have to worry about leap seconds.”

AFP