Did Your Computer Survive the 2012 Leap Second?

July 4th, 2012

I remember having to deal with leap seconds from my time in the military when I worked with satellites, but I never thought they’d affect down-to-earth things like websites. Yet that’s exactly what happened when an extra second was inserted at midnight on the evening of June 30th. Linux and Java didn’t handle the transition very well, causing affected systems to hang and thrash. As a result, several major websites went down briefly. Google, being on top of things like this, had its own plan for dealing with the leap second: the leap smear.