• The addition of a “leap second” is designed to allow the Earth’s rotation, which is gradually slowing, to catch up with atomic clocks, keeping official time neatly in sync with night and day.
  • Last time a leap second was added, on a weekend 2012, Mozilla, Reddit and LinkedIn all crashed. In Australia, more than 400 flights were grounded as the Qantas check-in system went down, requiring the job to be done manually.
  • Without the correction, civil time would very slowly drift away from time based on the Earth’s rotation, meaning that about 800 years from now the sun would be at its highest point in the sky at 1pm rather than noon.

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