June 30 Will Be One Second Longer This Year, and That Could Be a Problem (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by Theresa , Tuesday, January 06, 2015, 22:43

super-precise atomic clocks to our planet's rotation. But you know who's not on board with that? Those damn computers, whose operating systems just can't handle it. The last time we added a leap second in 2012, it wreaked havoc across the Internet.

Leap seconds are governed by the Paris-based International Earth Rotation Service, which this week announced its plan to make June 30, 2015 one second longer. This will be the 26th such leap second added since 1972.

In those intervening decades, though, we've become ever more dependent on computers and GPS systems that need to keep exact time—making the task ever more fraught. In 2012, the act of adding a simple second took down Mozilla, Reddit, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon, according to the Telegraph.

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