Leap second causes internet chaos
- Details
- Category: Industry News
- Published on Monday, 02 July 2012 18:43
- Written by Christian Dunn
You may have heard that in the last 24 hours as we brought in the new financial year we also brought in an extra second, and brought down a few websites. Yep, that's correct, 1 more second of our life.
Why did this happen?
To keep the global atomic clocks accurate that are used to centrally control time globally an additional 'leap' second was required to be added at the end of last month. This extra second was added at midnight. Unfortunately in the modern world of the internet our globally interconnected computer systems also use a technology known as NTP (Network Time Protocol) to talk to various servers and ultimately the atomic clocks to identify the accurate time.
Now changing the time *shouldn't* have any effect but the accuracy of many computer systems which rely on time for synchronising transactions means that any change in time can be critical.
In this case the change affected sites and services such as Reddit, Gawker, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Yelp, Mozilla, Java/Cassandra and many others causing them to experience issues for minutes or hours over the weekend.
Well, it is all back in order now, but this isn't a rare occurrence. In fact there have been dozens of leap seconds added since the concept was first started in 1972.
In fact anyone flying Qantas over the weekend who had a delayed flight, apparently the leap second also broke Amadeus which is their global booking system, requiring all flights to be delayed.
Who says clocks are simple?