“Leap second” causes flight delays and internet problems
Two visitors look at the atomic clock timescale at the US Naval Observatory in Washington D.C.
On Saturday, the day was slightly longer than 24 hours–by one second, to be exact. While that might not seem like much, it was enough to wreak havoc on the internet.
The Earth's official time keepers announced last week that they would add an extra second to the world's atomic clocks at the end of the day on June 30. The so-called "leap second" was added in order to keep the atomic clocks in line with the planet's daily rotation. There's just one major problem: many computing systems depend on the atomic clocks, Wired Magazine reported. When the extra second was tacked on Saturday, some of the computing systems just didn't know what to do.
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The leap second took down popular websites such as Yelp, Reddit, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and even the entire Gawker network, BuzzFeed reported.
The extra second also managed to mess up flights. The Qantas airline in Australia had to delay 50 of its flights, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. The reason? The extra second caused a glitch in a software called Amadeus that the Qantas airline depends on to monitor flight weight control and book seats, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Most of the websites are now running fine again, and better-prepared sites, such as Google, handled the extra second without any glitches, CNET reported.
Nonetheless, some people maintain that leap seconds are too risky and want a different system for regulating world time, the Telegraph reported.