The huge storms and leap second that occurred over the weekend affected a number of high-profile sites and Web services across the globe.
Leap second, an additional second added the world clock, saw the sites such as social news aggregator Reddit and location-based social network Foursquare collapse. The extra second compensates for irregularities caused by the earth’s rotation.
A storm on the American east coast hours earlier had resulted to extensive power outage that disrupted a leading cloud storage data centre. Those affected included Netflix and Instagram.
Amazon Web Services, whose service hundreds of companies across the globe use, had its cloud computing servers cut off in part by the storm. The servers host online content cheaply.
Even as some of the affected websites recovered from the disruption, more trouble ensued for Internet users following the leap second. On June 30, at 23:59:60 (00:59:60 BST), the extra second was added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The change disrupted several high-profile websites that rely intensively on synchronised operations.
Other sites affected, aside from Reddit and Foursquare, included LinkedIn and Gawker, and a Reddit-like site called StumbleUpon.
Reports further indicated airline booking systems were also disrupted.
Google on its official blog last year explained how it planned to avoid leap second effects using a technic it called a “leap smear,” which involves adding small fractions of time, such as a couple of milliseconds, gradually over the course of the day.
This means that when the time comes to add an extra second at midnight, Google’s clocks would have already taken this into account by “skewing the time over the course of the day.”
