the leap second
loreops cultureprogramming
The extra second occasionally inserted to keep atomic time aligned with Earth's rotation, and the outages it caused.
Because the planet's spin drifts against atomic clocks, timekeepers have irregularly added a 61st second to a chosen minute since 1972; software that assumed minutes have 60 seconds disagreed. The June 30, 2012 insertion famously took down Reddit, Mozilla services, and airline check-in systems, and later events pushed operators toward 'leap smearing', spreading the second invisibly across hours. In 2022 the world's metrology body voted to abolish leap seconds by 2035, a rare case of reality being patched to match the software.