Never mind the Millennium bug of yesteryear in the
last few days some of you may have experienced the Leap Second problem. Web
sites such as Reddit, Gawker, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Yelp
crashed after a "leap second" was added to the universal clock in order
to keep up with the Earth's rotation. The leap second is even being
blamed for a Qantas system meltdown associated with their global reservation
software Amadeus.
So the Leap Second
you ask…according to Wikipedia a leap
second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated
Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time.
The last leap second was inserted a day ago, on June 30, 2012 at 23:59:60 UTC.
The Coordinated
Universal Time standard uses the international system (SI) definition of the
second based on atomic clocks. However, the duration of one mean solar day is
slightly longer than 24 hours. The purpose of a leap second is to compensate
for this drift, by scheduling days with 86399 SI seconds.
So,
basically, slight fluctuations on the Earth's axis meant that some days ended
up being longer than others meaning that in a few hundred years time we'd be
eating lunch at midnight if the problem went unaddressed. The extra second
pulls everything back into line.
No comments:
Post a Comment