Meta is throwing its considerable weight behind the tech industry’s push to end the second leap. In a post on the company’s engineering blog, Meta production engineer Oleg Obleukhov and research scientist Ahmad Byagowi discussed how a second hop can wreak havoc on a network, along with the solution that Meta implement to avoid interruptions and any problems it may cause.
The second offset was introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and compensate for the difference between Atomic International Time (TAI), which is measured by atomic clocks, and imprecise observed solar time (UT1). Sometimes they don’t match because of irregularities and slowing of the Earth’s rotation caused by various geological and climate-induced events, such as the melting and freezing of ice caps on the highest mountains.
As Obleukhov and Byagowi point out, the compensation that a split second creates can cause problems for the entire industry. In 2012, for example, it took Reddit down for 40 minutes when the time change confused its servers and crashed its CPUs. A time jump added in 2017 also affected Cloudflare’s DNS service.
To avoid unwanted disruptions, Meta and other tech companies, such as Google and Amazon, use a technique called “smearing.” These companies “keep” a leap second by slowing down or speeding up the clock for several hours. Meta does a split second over the course of 17 hours, while Google uses a 24-hour blur technique that runs from noon to noon and encourages everyone to follow suit. That way, a leap second doesn’t create any weird timestamps that can disable networks.
But Meta is not defending the adoption of his defamation technique: the purpose of his new publication is to give his voice to the movement calling for the retirement of the second interlocutor. The body in charge of deciding whether to adjust UTC, the International Earth Rotation and Reference System Service, has added 27 leap seconds since 1972. Meta thinks that’s enough adjustment for the next millennium .
The company’s charge comes more than a year before the fate of the second interlocutor is decided. In 2015, the International Telecommunication Union discussed the second jump at its World Radiocommunication Conference and concluded that more studies are needed to find out the impact of the spill. The union is expected to review the results of the studies and consider the proposal to remove the second jump at its next conference in 2023.
Meta said in his post:
“Second jump events have caused problems for the industry and continue to present many risks. As an industry, we run into problems every time a second jump is introduced. And because it’s such a rare event, it devastates the community every time what’s going on. With increasing demand for clock precision across all industries, the second leap is now causing more harm than good, leading to disruption and disruption.”
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