Global timekeeping moves to end leap seconds next year
The change is meant to reduce the chance of software and infrastructure failures tied to time synchronization.
Global timekeeping is moving toward ending leap seconds sooner than planned, a change aimed at reducing the risk of synchronization failures in software and infrastructure. On Thursday, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures voted to scrap leap seconds and accelerate the retirement date to May 20 next year, instead of waiting until 2035. The shift matters because leap-second handling has triggered outages before at companies like Foursquare, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Yelp, and major tech firms including Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have backed removing the system. After the change, timekeepers will rely on “leap hours” instead, letting atomic and astronomical time diverge until a full hour adjustment is needed, which is not expected for about 3,000 years.
Why it matters
For services that depend on precise time, the move removes a known source of outages and simplifies how clocks are handled. It also ends the current leap-second system sooner, so operators and platform teams can plan around a different timekeeping model instead of recurring one-second adjustments.
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Sources
- The Verge