HAVOC

Internet Not Ready for Leap Second

Reddit, Mozilla, Gawker Media and more affected.

For one second, it sure wreaked havoc on the Internet. Several high-profile websites, including Reddit and several other sites, experienced brief technical problems early Sunday due to a glitch brought on by the “leap second.” The Earth’s official timekeepers held back the clocks by a single second to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and although the leap had been previously reported, some of the Internet’s fundamental software platforms could not cope with the extra second. Affected were the Linux operating system, used by FourSquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Gawker and StumbleUpon, and the Java application system, used by Reddit. Other platforms, such as Google, planned ahead. To make matters worse, the leap second bug came as many Internet sites were recovering from an Amazon cloud outage in northern Virginia on Saturday—estimated to have taken down as much as one percent of the entire Internet.