Leap Second Bug Momentarily Takes Down Websites
Did you come across any websites that were down on Sunday morning? An additional second added to atomic clocks was the cause of certain websites suffering an outage.
Source: Twitter
Did you know that the world got an additional second of time on Saturday, 30 June 2012? The additional second, or leap second, was added courtesy of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, which is in charge of maintaining global time standards. Due to the earth's rotation, the leap second was added to atomic clocks in order to keep them all synchronized.
However, this little addition caused major issues for certain websites, which had a hard time coming to terms with being online for an extra second. Popular websites such as Foursquare, Reddit and Gawker websites all experienced technical problems. In fact, Gawker websites were offline for 45 minutes.
As for everyone else, enjoy your extra second of life!
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