2015 'leap second' to cause IT chaos, warn experts

Earth's one-second time shift needs attention to avert tech problems

If you thought 2015 was only going to have the usual 31,536,000 seconds this year, you're absolutely wrong. And that could lead to no end of problems with IT as one extra second is added to the clock.

According to the Paris observatory, this year will have an extra second in order to compensate for the gradual slowing down of the earth's rotation, meaning we'll all be able to enjoy a total of 31,536,001 seconds in 2015. It will be the 26th leap second since 1972, and it has the potential to affect IT systems in a variety of ways.

2002's leap second caused problems with Reddit, Foursquare, Yelp and LinkedIn, with general problems also surfacing in Linux-based systems and with Java.

The main concern is that more and more IT is starting to sync up directly with atomic clocks, which means their timing is so precise that the slightest deviation could throw processes out. A server could be shown the same second twice in a row as the second ‘leaps', and may be unable to move onto the next logical instruction.

Google provided a "leap smear" last time around, which meant it added tiny fractions of a second to time over the previous year, so that a one-second leap would not be necessary.

Experts in the US argue that "leap seconds" should be removed entirely, deeming them unneccessary, but this would also signal the end of the sun-based measure known as Greenwich Mean Time.

The "leap second" is unlikely to cause as much disruption as the Millennium Bug, which, although widely seen as a damp squib, did cause numerous problems with banking systems, nuclear power plants in Japan and even (fittingly) the US government's naval master clock, which keeps the country's official time.

Also, stay tuned for the "Year 2038 problem", which may break the traditional 32-bit integer used to express time by having its number exceed the limit, and is currently being allowed for by converting systems and languages to 64-bit alternatives.