Quantum Windbag
Gold Member
- May 9, 2010
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Most of you probably didn't notice, but yesterday was a second longer than normal. this extra second cause quite a few sites to go down because the clocks were suddenly wrong.
'Leap Second' Bug Wreaks Havoc Across Web | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Reddit, Mozilla, and possibly many other web outfits experienced brief technical problems on Saturday evening, when software underpinning their online operations choked on the leap second that was added to the worlds atomic clocks.
On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July, the Earths official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planets daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the nets fundamental software platforms including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform were unable to cope with the extra second.
Many computing systems use whats called the Network Time Protocol, or NTP, to keep themselves in sync with the worlds atomic clocks, and when an extra second is added, some just dont know how to handle it.
'Leap Second' Bug Wreaks Havoc Across Web | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com