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How a single second briefly took down parts of the internet last night
When the year 2000 was approaching, there was a big deal about the Y2K Bug, and whether or not a simple date change would take down our entire global electronic infrastructure. But last night, when a leap second was added to coordinated universal time, shit went sort of haywire, at least briefly.
There is a tiny gap between traditional “rotational time” and the modern “coordinated universal time,” due to the fact that the earth spins a tiny bit slower every year due to tides and internal processes. No clock can accomodate an “extra second,” so clocks are stopped for one second at 23:59:59 in order to add the “leap second” to our universal time. Elisa Felicitas Arias of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures explained in 2008 that “It might seem stupid to say that you have a difference of only one second… but for the stock exchange, one second is important. For an airport, one second is important. For global navigation satellite systems, the difference of a second is unacceptable.”
While the backbone of the internet and the major internet companies and ISPs were prepared for the change, it did knock out Reddit, all of the Gawker sites, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Foursquare, Linkedin and Meetup for a while.
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posted 01 July, 2012
by cranberryzero
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relright reblogged this from iheartchaos and added:
WHOA I forgot yesterday was...longest day I will ever live
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