Just one second
Everyone knows about the Leap Year and most even know why we get the extra day every four years. However in our times of atomic clocks and addiction to extremely precise time measurement we need other corrections. Each day has a little different length and from time to time we have no choice if we want to keep with the planet's rotation we need to adjust the time. It comes in the form of Leap Second - an extra second added to the day at midnight GMT that is the Universal Time everything else refers to.
It happened yesterday and the internet failed. Remember all the panic of Y2K - if you were to young - everyone were afraid the internet servers would fail and the whole world would get disconnected because they only used two digits for year in old OS and keep doing in upgrades so with dates rolling over everything was about to fail. However, this never happened as everyone was talking about it and system got upgraded and the word didn't end. It seems we didn't talk about leap second often enough.
Many of the word's biggest sites - Reddit, 4Chan, LinkedIn, The Pirate Bay, Yelp, Meetup, Gawker, Mozzilla, Foursquare - experienced problems and shut down when leap second struck. It seems that all that was affected was either based on Debian Squeeze Linux servers or running something based on Java/Cassandra. Luckily, the world didn't end from this either. Maybe because, unlike so many others, Google was prepared and didn't fail.
Let's hope we'll do better with next one.
It happened yesterday and the internet failed. Remember all the panic of Y2K - if you were to young - everyone were afraid the internet servers would fail and the whole world would get disconnected because they only used two digits for year in old OS and keep doing in upgrades so with dates rolling over everything was about to fail. However, this never happened as everyone was talking about it and system got upgraded and the word didn't end. It seems we didn't talk about leap second often enough.
Many of the word's biggest sites - Reddit, 4Chan, LinkedIn, The Pirate Bay, Yelp, Meetup, Gawker, Mozzilla, Foursquare - experienced problems and shut down when leap second struck. It seems that all that was affected was either based on Debian Squeeze Linux servers or running something based on Java/Cassandra. Luckily, the world didn't end from this either. Maybe because, unlike so many others, Google was prepared and didn't fail.
Let's hope we'll do better with next one.