The second is broken

JULY 25, 2022

It’s time to leave the leap second in the past "While the leap second might have been an acceptable solution in 1972, when it made both the scientific community and the telecom industry happy, these days UTC is equally bad for both digital applications and scientists, who often choose TAI or UT1 instead." "At Meta, we’re supporting an industry effort to stop future introductions of leap seconds and . . . we believe it is time to introduce new technologies to replace it." "At best, such a time jump crashed programs or even corrupted data, due to weird timestamps in the data storage." "The impact of a negative leap second has never been tested on a large scale; it could have a devastating effect on the software relying on timers or schedulers." "In any case, every leap second is a major source of pain for people who manage hardware infrastructures."