![]() ![]() “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.” “Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something,” Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator, told Wired. This made them ring the alarm clocks, waking up countless sleeping applications at once and overloading the machines’ CPUs. When the leap second hit, all of these subsystems were a second ahead of the main OS. In some cases it sets an alarm clock to wake the sleeping application if the OS is taking too long. This subsystem is used when an application is sleeping and waiting for the operating system to complete another task. Reddit is run on open source Linux operating systems, which nearly ground to a halt after the leap second was added. The 2012 leap second took Reddit down, among other sites. Not long afterwards Instagram, Tinder and Facebook went down too.Īs we increasingly rely on social media to keep in touch with friends, stay up to date with the news and find funny videos, the prospect of being cut off is enough to send us into panic mode. Depending on where you live in the world, you may remember Twitter being mysteriously unavailable just one month ago. ![]() Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn and Slack are just some of the sites that have been affected in the last few years.īut it’s not just rogue seconds that take websites offline. The problem is that every time it has happened in recent memory, large sections of the internet have not been able to cope and have gone offline. How many seconds in a minute? When the answer is 61, the internet has a meltdown.Īs the Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down, a leap second needs to be added every now and then to keep the clocks aligned with the stars. ![]()
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January 2023
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