The
addition of an extra second to the world’s atomic clocks was apparently too
much for some popular Web sites and software platforms to take. It only takes a
single second to create havoc on the Internet. The addition of a leap second to
the Coordinated Universal Time at midnight Greenwich Mean Time last night
appears to have caused site disruptions for a handful of popular Web sites and
software platforms. The adjustment, which was made by International Earth
Rotation and Reference Systems Service, was necessary to keep atomic clocks in
line with the Earth’s ever-changing speed of rotation. Dozens of leap seconds
have been added since their introduction in 1972. One of the sites affected by
the bug was the popular link-sharing site Reddit, which in a tweet blamed the
extra second for causing problems with the open-source database Apache
Cassandra, which is built with Java: Mozilla, the organization behind the
Firefox Web browser, blamed the extra second for problems it was experiencing
with Hadoop, another open-source platform built with Java. In a Mozilla bug
report that said “Java is choking on leap second,” site reliability engineer
Eric Ziegenhorn said it appeared the two were related because they occurred at
the same time:Gawker media sites confirmed that it experienced issues related
to the bug as well. “We were not 100 percent offline, but the service was very
unpredictable for about 30 minutes last night,” Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett told
Micron Associates. StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare, and LinkedIn were also
affected by the leap second, according to a Micron Associates report. Micron
Associates has contacted these companies for comment on the issue and will
update this report when we learn more. The idea that the addition of an extra
second to clocks could cause trouble for Web sites is not exactly new. In a
blog post last month, Marco Marongiu, a systems engineer at Opera Software,
discussed some of the reasons systems might fail by the sudden introduction of
an extra second and described a work-around to help avoid crashes. Google
explained in a blog post last September that it softens the blow by gradually
adding milliseconds to its systems clocks prior to the official addition of a
leap second. “This meant that when it became time to add an extra second at
midnight, our clocks had already taken this into account, by skewing the time
over the course of the day,” the company said. “All of our servers were then
able to continue as normal with the New Year, blissfully unaware that a leap
second had just occurred.”