The General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) voted at its 28th meeting to stop adding leap seconds.
Why
- Leap seconds keep UTC in step with Earth’s variable rotation (UT1). Lately Earth has sped up a bit, raising the prospect of the first-ever negative leap second.
- The resolution says a negative leap second poses “a high risk of causing anomalies and disruption to critical infrastructures that are largely unprepared,” with preparation costs compared to Y2K.
- IoT is a big factor: billions of devices, many hard to update, might not handle a leap second, especially a negative one.
- Big providers already smear leap seconds in different ways, so systems drift out of agreement with each other.
My take
Anyone who has chased an NTP or certificate-time bug knows one second can break real systems. Ending leap seconds is the practical call for networks, logs and anything that signs data with a timestamp.
