Internet braces for impending ‘leap second’

Prepare for the Internet to crash — or at least falter slightly — at 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Every few years, the world’s official timekeepers tack an extra second onto the clocks to account for the slight discrepancy between our time measurement and the slightly lagging speed of the Earth’s actual rotation.

{mosads}But the last time this happened, in 2012, the Internet couldn’t handle it.

Reddit, Gawker, LinkedIn, FourSquare and Yelp all briefly crashed. The online reservation system for Australian airline Qantas went down for two hours, delaying hundreds of flights and forcing staff to check in passengers the old fashioned way: by hand.

Reddit tweeted: “You ever wish you had an extra second or two? This is not one of those times.”

So this time around, systems administrations have been wringing their hands for months leading up to tonight’s brief pause in time.

Apparently much of the code supporting the Internet struggles to understand why time would suddenly stop.

“Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something,” Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds, told Wired in 2012. “It’s really annoying, because it’s a classic case of code that is basically never run, and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions.”

Google has started adding milliseconds to its servers from time to time to avoid the full-second jump.

But it’s difficult to create a permanent coding solution, since leap seconds don’t occur on a regular schedule.

“The leap second is a hiccup in the time scale that’s not predictable,” John Lowe, a group leader in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Time and Frequency Services division, told Slate earlier this year. “If you’re writing code right now you know when every leap day is going to occur all the way into the future. But leap seconds can’t be predicted. There’s five or six months of advanced notice, but that can be a problem for long-term programs that are already written.”

So where does that leave us for tonight? Maybe reconsider that flight you’re about to board, Demetrios Matsakis, the chief scientist for time services at the US Naval Observatory, told Motherboard back in January.

“There will definitely be failures of some systems — how significant, I don’t know,” he said. “I would suggest not to be in the air flying when the leap second is enacted.”