Goodbye to the leap second: global timekeeping rewrites the rules
Translated by a model; the original is in Russian.
Global timekeeping is bracing for a major change meant to head off infrastructure failures reminiscent of the Y2K scare. On Thursday, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) voted to scrap the leap second — an ad hoc adjustment occasionally added to standard time so that it mirrors the Earth's real (and uneven) rotation.
Back in 2022, BIPM members agreed to stop using leap seconds on or before 2035. That deadline has now been pulled forward to May 20th of next year, timed to coincide with World Metrology Day.
Why the rush
The reason for the acceleration is unprecedented: shifts in the Earth's rotation may soon force timekeepers to subtract a second rather than add one in order to keep astronomical time aligned with atomic time. This has never been attempted, and there are worries that a negative adjustment could wreak havoc on critical infrastructure that depends on time synchronization.
The fears are hardly groundless. Adding leap seconds has previously triggered outages at Foursquare, Reddit, LinkedIn, Yelp, and many other platforms. Companies including Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all backed doing away with the system.
What comes next
In place of the leap second, timekeepers will switch to "leap hours": atomic and astronomical time will be allowed to drift apart gradually until a full hour needs to be added. That isn't expected to happen for roughly three thousand years.
Source: The Verge
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