The days of the leap second creating headaches for software engineers are coming to an end. On Friday, government representatives at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris, France voted nearly unanimously to retire the practice of occasionally adding one second to official clocks (via The New York Times).Introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to reconcile discrepancies that can come up between atomic time and observed solar time, the leap second has been the bane of tech companies for decades. In 2012, for instance, Reddit was down for about 40 minutes when the addition of a leap second that year confused the company’s servers. More recently, Cloudflare saw part of its DNS services affected due to a time change in 2016.Companies like Facebook parent Meta employ a technique called “smearing” to avoid outages whenever the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service adjusts UTC to add a leap second. Earlier this year, the social me
