Few people are aware of the existence of leap seconds, what they do or how they affect the technology we use every day, like the internet. Most people are familiar with leap years, which occur every four years when an extra day is added to February. This adjustment is necessary to keep calendars aligned with the astronomical seasons. It was once common consensus that leap seconds were required to perform a function similar to what leap years do. But this belief is no longer a firmly held one in the corners of the scientific community responsible for keeping the world's time.
Oddly enough, the leap second isn't as old as time. It's only been around since 1972. That was the year the International Earth Rotation Systems Service (IERS) decided to add an extra 'tick' to the world's clocks to keep them in sync with the Earth's rotation around the sun, which it does 365.25 times per year. The Earth's rotation has been slowing gradually in the last million years. Adding leap seconds was a purposeful deviation from International Atomic Time (TAI). In the fifty years since that first adjustment, the same process has been completed 27 times. Although 27 times in 50 years cannot be considered a regular occurrence, that occasional adjustment has been enough to wreak occasional havoc on systems many rely on. Because of this, it has fallen out of favor with those who believe messing with time is a risky business.
Most of that risk is related to machines and how humans rely on them to be accurate. When the Linux systems ran the social news and discussion site Reddit in 2012, it could not accommodate an added leap second. Web security company Cloudflare faced a similar issue during the addition of a leap second in 2017. A negative value was recorded for one of its Domain Name System (DNS) servers that should have been zero at most. The company fixed the error promptly but had to issue an apology to its customers for the inconvenience. Computer programs and servers run on protocols that tell them what to do and when. They can malfunction for various reasons. If a program is supposed to perform the Y function 100 milliseconds after X occurs, a whole extra second thrown into the mix is worse than a ghost in the machine. The irony is that adding a single second can incapacitate computers capable of completing 200 quadrillion mathematic calculations per second. Since the added leap second is a rare line of code that has never been tested, it is a hit-or-miss undertaking rife with uncertainty. For many tech companies, it represents unnecessary risk. In a blog post from July 2022, tech company, Meta, announced it would discontinue adding leap seconds. It said, "Every leap second is a major source of pain for people who manage hardware infrastructures." The post insisted that the time had come to introduce new technologies to replace this artificial adjustment.
Microsoft, Amazon and Google announced they would also discontinue adding leap seconds. This comes years after tech companies began using "smearing" during leap seconds. Smearing can be done in different ways. For example, Google does it by slowing its server clocks so that one second is approximately 11.6 microseconds slower than the standard second. According to the tech giant, this is enough to offset the effects of a leap second over the following 12 hours. So smearing is merely an attempt to preemptively counter internet outages and other harm that a leap second may cause.
Google is also ready to call it quits on smearing and leap seconds along with its technology brethren. Other than holding the Earth stationary on its axis for a tenth of a second every three years, there isn't much that humans can do about the unaligned time caused by the planet's movement. And Meta has not elaborated on which new technologies should replace the leap second. Instead, it explains the problem with this phenomenon as a spinning figure skater spreading and contracting her arms to increase and decrease her velocity and maintain her rotational momentum. Her arms can be said to represent time stretching and contracting as the Earth spins on its axis. It is a never-ending but necessary operation. Inserting leap seconds into this movement causes, at best, disorientation. At worst, it results in costly disruptions of the world's technological infrastructure.
Source: Meta
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/WX5sCmi