Meta Calls for , Putting an End to , the Leap Second.
Meta has added considerable pressure to the tech industry's push to do away with the leap second. .
Engadget reports that the leap
second was introduced in 1972.
It was implemented to adjust Coordinated Universal Time
(UTC) and make up for the difference between International
Atomic Time (TAI) and observed solar time (UTI).
Those different time-keeping methods
sometimes don't match up due to irregularities
and slowdowns in the Earth's rotation.
Meta's production engineer, Oleg Obleukhov, and research
scientist Ahmad Byagowi recently posted about how
a leap second can wreak havoc on a network.
With a growing demand for clock precision
across all industries, the leap second is
now causing more damage than good,
resulting in disturbances and outages, Oleg Obleukhov and Ahmad Byagowi, Meta's production engineer and research scientist, via Engadget.
The offset caused by a leap second
can cause issues all over the industry.
In 2012, the time change confused
Reddit's servers and locked up
its CPUs for 40 minutes.
In 2017, a similar situation
affected Cloudflare's
DNS service. .
Since 1972, the body responsible for deciding whether
to adjust the UTC, the International Earth Rotation and
Reference Systems Service, has added 27 leap seconds.