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Tech Companies Propose Eliminating the Disruptive 'Leap Second'

A sundial (James Mead/Dreamstime.com)

By Peter Malbin | Tuesday, 26 July 2022 11:38 AM EDT

Meta (the parent company of Facebook) is endorsing the tech industry's effort to scrap the leap second, an occasional extra tick that keeps clocks in sync with the Earth's actual rotation.

In a post on the company's engineering blog, Meta production engineer Oleg Obleukhov and research scientist Ahmad Byagowi discussed how a leap second can damage a network.

"Leap second events have caused issues across the industry and continue to present many risks. As an industry, we bump into problems whenever a leap second is introduced. And because it’s such a rare event, it devastates the community every time it happens.

"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."

Meta joins Google, Microsoft, and Amazon in launching a public effort to eliminate the leap second. U.S. and French timekeeping authorities agree with the proposal, CNET reported.

The leap second was introduced in 1972 to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and make up for the difference between the International Atomic Time (TAI), which is measured by atomic clocks, and imprecise observed solar time (UT1), Yahoo Finance noted.

They sometimes don't match, owing to irregularities and slowdown in the Earth's rotation caused by various climate-induced and geological events, such as the melting and refreezing of ice caps on the tallest mountains, Yahoo Finance observed.

In 2012, the leap second knocked out Reddit for 40 minutes after the time change confused its servers and locked up its CPUs. There were related problems at Mozilla, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Amadeus, CNET reported. A time leap added in 2017 also affected Cloudflare's DNS service.

To prevent unwanted outages, Meta and other tech companies, such as Google and Amazon, utilize a technique called "smearing." The tech companies "smear" a leap second by slowing down or speeding up the clock throughout a number of hours.

Meta smears a leap second throughout 17 hours, while Google uses a 24-hour smear technique that lasts from noon to noon. That way, a leap second doesn't create any weird time stamps that could throw networks off, Yahoo Finance reported.

The organization responsible for deciding whether to adjust UTC, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, has added 27 leap seconds since 1972. Meta believes that's enough adjustment for the next millennium.

The International Telecommunications Union is expected to consider the proposal to end the leap second at its next conference in 2023.

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