Leap second change sees computer systems crash

By Sahibzada Zaheen Iqbal
Correspondent SAM Daily Times

ALL it took was a single second to bring down websites all over the world.

Sites such as Reddit, Gawker, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Yelp crashed after a "leap second" was added to the universal clock in order to keep up with the Earth's rotation.

Slight fluctuations on the Earth's axis meant that some days ended up being longer than others meaning that in a few hundred years time we'd be eating lunch at midnight if the problem went unaddressed.

All it needed was an extra second to pull everything back into line.

Simple right?

No, not so much.

The extra second sent some websites into a spin. Reddit announced on Twitter that the second was causing problems with its Java, Mashable reported.

Gawker's entire website was down for about 45 minutes. Aggregator Stumbleupon and review website Yelp also reported problems.



Despite the technical issues, the one-second-solution was deemed a success.

The glitch followed a severe power outage in the US causing photo app Instagram to be down most of the weekend, along with social network Pinterest and video streaming service, Netflix.

The outages were caused by a storm in Virginia, which caused Amazon's servers (which the businesses hosted their websites on) to fail.