A Leap Second; Rectifying The Earth’s Movements And Causing Havoc On the Internet
Horologists around the world literally took time into their own hands and added a leap second to the last minute on the 30th of June 2012. There has been much debate over the leap second and many dedicated server hosting systems as well as the internet itself was affected and even crashed.
The leap second addition made the last 60 seconds of June the 30th 61 seconds long. Timekeepers added this second to compensate for the movement of the earth and its ‘wobbly’ actions. In more scientific terms, the leap second compensated for the earth’s steadily divergence from solar time, meaning the period required for Earth to complete a day. There has been much debate around the leap second addition with many experts expressing concern of its affect on the Internet and many data systems. This concern proved legitimate as there were certain disruptions. The Internet ‘died’ due to the leap second addition and sites such as Yelp, Reddit, and even the Gawker network were down. The Internet hasn’t been having much luck lately as on Friday night, it fell victim to a burly thunderstorm outside of Washington D.C., taking out a section of Amazon’s servers, which are host to sites and services such as Instagram and Netflix. When the leap second was added on the 30th of June 2012, an action that has only taken place 24 times since 1972, technology such as satellite internet servers, data networks and laptops, sync up their clocks with the atomic clocks. The problem occurs as these technologies get thrown when a leap second is added as they see the same second twice in a row.
The end result was relatively chaotic; sites were down for hours and administers did damage control. If one leap second can cause such havoc to an entire network of technologies, imagine what a minute or hour would do. This just further highlights and cements the human race’s dependence on the Internet and other technology based items.
