More than a decade after the Y2K scare, a single extra second has caused problems for a number of notable web companies. The leap second — a one-second adjustment added to atomic clocks to synchronize it with clocks based on the Earth’s rotation — occurred on Saturday night and caught a number of companies unaware. Reddit tweeted that it was having Java/Cassandra issues due to the extra second, while Mozilla filed a bug report also due to leap second-related Java issues.
Leap second bug: Reddit, Mozilla, and more experience technical issues
Just one day after another massive outage, a number of notable web firms went down due to a pesky extra second on the clock.
Just one day after another massive outage, a number of notable web firms went down due to a pesky extra second on the clock.
is an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.
The Gawker network went down for around 45 minutes due to the bug, and the likes of StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare, and LinkedIn were reportedly affected as well. Google, meanwhile, had been prepared for quite some time, developing a solution called a “leap smear” to combat the pesky extra second. While all of the affected services appear to be up and running now, the outages came at a bad time for internet denizens — just one night earlier an Amazon Web Services outage caused the likes of Netflix and Instagram to go down.
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