The “leap second” application, which has been in effect since 1972 and has caused various problems in the technological infrastructure, is becoming a thing of the past. It has been decided that starting from 2035, the leap second will not be added to UTC.
Although the clocks on our wrists and phones show the same constant 24 hours a day until the split second, in reality, this is not the case. The world rotates around itself for various reasons. more It can complete slowly or quickly.
For this reason, we may occasionally see news such as ‘Next year will be one second longer/shorter than this year’. Here is the difference, especially technological infrastructure is of great importance. Today, a revolutionary decision was made about this disorder.
The ‘leap second’ will not be applied from the near future: Let’s first look at the rationale, then the decision:
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which has been accepted as the standard all over the world since 1972, is the average every 21 months Additional seconds, called ‘leap seconds’, could be added to the number of seconds in a year. Since the practice came into effect in 1972, the total Added 27 leap seconds.
However, the addition of this leap second to UTC, which is caused by the slowing down of the Earth’s rotation, has been a challenge for the infrastructure adopting this system until today. caused some serious problems. For example, Cloudflare explained the reason for the huge DNS blackout that it experienced at midnight in 2017 in leap seconds. In 2012, giant sites such as Reddit, LinkedIn and Foursquare collapsed.
The background of this collapse through the eyes of a computer It would make more sense to address it: You expect to enter the next day after the 23rd hour, 59th minute and 59th second, right? However, with a change made one day, the watch on your wrist suddenly starts to show the 23rd hour, 59th minute and 60th second. When you see that 60th second, you don’t enter a new day, you encounter a brand new concept that has no equivalent for you. You don’t have any commands to run at the moment, so you crash.
While technology companies have long opposed the addition of leap seconds to UTC in order to avoid problems with their systems, today they finally have this issue. A concrete step has been taken.
Leap seconds to UTC, voted on by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures not to be added the decision has been made. But the decision from 2035 will come into effect. So leap seconds will continue to be added to UTC for the next 10 years.
The date range when the decision will be effective is stated as ‘at least until 2135’. This is a leap second unless otherwise decided. for at least 100 years It means it won’t be added to UTC. In this process, scientists plan to develop better systems to equalize astronomical time and atomic time.