Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon bid to abandon the Leap Second

Tech giants Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have joined together to launch a public effort ditch the leap second, a one-second adjustment occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which keeps the clocks in sync with the Earth's actual rotation.

The leap tick was introduced in 1972 and has been added 27 times to the global clock or the International Atomic Time (TAI) since then. However, this has caused internet outages and issues for computers.

Ahmad Byagowi and Oleg Obleukhov, research scientists from Meta wrote in a blog post: "At Meta, we’re supporting an industry effort to stop future introductions of leap seconds and stay at a current level of 27. Introducing new leap seconds is a risky practice that does more harm than good, and we believe it is time to introduce new technologies to replace it.

"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.”

In 2012, Reddit suffered an outage due to a leap second which caused the site to be down for around 40 minutes and In 2017, Cloudflare write about how a leap second had the company’s public DNS server to fail.

As well as the tech giants, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its French equivalent, the Bureau International de Poids et Mesures (BIPM) are supporting the move to get rid of the leap second.

“As engineers at Meta, we are supporting a larger community push to stop the future introduction of leap seconds and remain at the current level of 27, which we believe will be enough for the next millennium.” The blog post continued.