Explained: What are leap seconds and why tech giants want to put an end to it – Times of India

US tech giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others want to put an end to “leap seconds” which help to keep computing time in sync with Earth‘s rotational time. According to a report by ZDNet, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has supported the industry’s effort to stop any future usage of the “confusing and potentially dangerous practice” and has also proposed to get rid of these leap seconds.
What are leap seconds
Leap second was first introduced in 1972 by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. It is used as a measure to combat the long-term slowdown in the Earth’s rotation which is caused by the constant melting and refreezing of ice caps. Moreover, leap seconds are also used to measure the imprecise nature of observed solar time (UT1). The global time watchdog often suggests adding another second to an hour. 27 leap seconds have been added since 1972 and most likely that is going to all.
Why tech giants are trying to get rid of it
Meta has updated its blog post to explain the reason for abandoning leap seconds. The company’s production engineer Oleg Obleukhov and research scientist Ahmad Byagowi have written in the post, “As an industry, we bump into problems whenever a leap second is introduced and it’s such a rare event that it devastates the community every time it happens.” The blog post also adds, “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.”
Moreover, Meta has also explained how leap seconds can be confusing for computers. As per a report by Techradar, in 2012, Reddit faced a major outage due to a leap second which made the popular website inaccessible for about 30 to 40 minutes. Reddit’s high-resolution timer (hrtimer) reportedly got confused by the time change and caused hyperactivity on the servers which ultimately locked up the machines’ CPUs.
Apart from Reddit, other services have also faced challenges with this time-changing practice. Even Cloudflare shared an article pointing out the impact of a leap second on their public DNS in 2017. The company claimed that the primary cause of the bug that affected their DNS service was the belief that time cannot go backward, the report suggests.
How tech giants are trying to combat this problem
Tech giants like Meta and Google use a technique called smearing to fight these “potentially disastrous outages.” In this technique, the leap second gets “smeared” over a longer period which is 17 hours in the case of Meta.
Apart from Meta, the International Telecommunication Union has also been highly critical of the practice and has decided to publish a report on the topic in 2023 after it is done debating whether leap seconds should be ended or not.