But what is leap second ? Well it is one-second adjustment that is applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC is primary regulatory of clocks and time based on International Atomic Time for official time adjustment and responsible for occasional time adjustment of leap second introduced dozen times since 1972.
Leap second change is based on earth rotation speed that depends on climatic and geological events is adjusted under International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) which decides when leap second changes take place.
Several sites like Amazon Web Services, Reddit, Gawker Media, Foursquare, Mozilla, Opera were down on Saturday when “leap second” was born. The world's atomic clock which keeps precise official times across different countries was paused for one second in order to keep clocks in sync with the rotational speed of the earth.
There were reports of failure of Linux operating system, java application platform based servers to cope with extra second leap addition. Many dependable websites were affected by it. Some Network Time Protocol or NTP cannot handle extra second resulting in breakdown.
Mozilla reported problem, that it experienced in Hadoop open source platform built with Java, blaming on extra second. Other complaints came on linux based server users from LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Gawker, FourSquare which were hit by leap bug .
In summary we find that most of the servers running prominent websites and lesser were unable to cope up with or unaware of change that took place, continue to work as normal ignorantly.
No comments:
Post a Comment