The company said it will add milliseconds to its servers all day instead of one whopping second all at once.
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The reasoning behind the leap second is not dissimilar from the need for a leap year. It takes earth 86 400.002 seconds to rotate a full cycle, and by adding those up through an entire year, it equals to nearly a second – but it’s not that easy. “A single second of downtime for a stock market means up to $4.6 million (£2.9m) could be lost”, The Next Web writes. Though, in reality, the Earth’s rotation decelerates in unpredictable ways daily.
However, if that small discrepancy were to be repeated each day for the full day, it would add almost a second.
The potential problems mean there are vocal opponents of introducing the leap second, but scientists say it is essential for research purposes. An extremely precise methodology is used to do so: the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). “UT1 isn’t as uniform as the cesium clock, so UT1 and UTC tend to drift apart”, MacMillan said. Well we do not think that this year’s leap second will have quite the same effect, but NASA does note that adding a second to the mix can confuse our electronic overlords: “Leap seconds have created challenges for some computer systems and generated some calls to abandon them altogether”. Well, the global Earth Rotation and Reference Systems has answered your prayers – once again. It’s a real thing, and it’s why June 30, 2015 will be exactly one second longer than usual.
Normally, clocks will move from 11:59 p.m. or June 30 at 23:59:59 to all zeroes 00:00:00. Many systems actually turn off for one second to account for the extra leap second. On Tuesday, global timekeepers are tacking a second to the clock to compensate for a slightly slower Earth rotation.
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The addition of a “leap second” was initiated in 1972 so that atomic clocks everywhere could stay in sync with the Earth’s rotation, which is gradually slowing by around two-thousandths of a second per day.
