When a leap second was added in 2012, it caused substantial outages for sites like Foursquare, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Yelp. By 2015, when the next leap second was due, engineers had mostly learned their lessons, but there were still some glitches. Ditto 2016. As Linux creator Linus Torvalds put it: Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something. It’s really annoying, because it’s a classic case of code that is basically never run, and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions.
This is why social media conglomerate Meta wants to get rid of the leap second. In a blog post published yesterday, the company’s engineering team outlined their argument against adding leap seconds, saying it’s an adjustment that mainly benefits scientists and astronomers
(as it allows them to make observations of celestial bodies using UTC). This benefit is less important than it once was, says Meta, and outweighed by the confusion leap seconds cause in the tech world.
Introducing new leap seconds is a risky practice that does more harm than good, and we believe it is time to introduce new technologies to replace it
, says the company.
James VincentSounds like a self-serving proposal rooted in the arrogant belief that tech companies are so important to our lives and economy that their points of view take precedence over anyone else’s. Maybe Facebook should simply hire better software engineers, and devise methods to test run code related to handling leap seconds before deploying it into production. I mean, Facebook’s servers can’t handle leap seconds once in a while, but we’re supposed to trust them to build entire self-contained virtual reality worlds?!
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