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SciTech
'Leap second' bug causes Internet glitch
What a difference one second can make - especially on major operations on the Internet.
A so-called "leap-second" bug caused problems with some big name web operations such as Reddit and Mozilla last Saturday, a tech site reported Monday (Manila time).
Wired.com said many web outfits experienced brief technical problems on Saturday evening, when their software "choked" on the “leap second” added to the world’s atomic clocks.
"Some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second," it said.
It added many computing systems use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to keep themselves in sync with the world’s atomic clocks.
"(And) when an extra second is added, some just don’t know how to handle it," it said.
Earth's official timekeepers had added a second to June 30 - at midnight GMT - to keep in sync with the planet's daily rotation.
Wired.com said the “leap second bug” hit just as the web was recovering from a major outage to Amazon Web Services.
"(Many) complained of issues with Linux servers, and according to BuzzFeed, FourSquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Gawker, and StumbleUpon were also felled by the leap second bug," it said.
On the other hand, some operations such as Google saw the leap second coming and prepared for it.
Reddit
Reddit, a popular news aggregation and discussion site owned by the same parent company as Wired, said on its Twitter account it was experiencing problems with “Java/Cassandra,” referring to the open source database.
It attributed these problems to the leap second.
Originally designed by Facebook and now used across the web and beyond, Cassandra is built with Java.
Mozilla
Mozilla site reliability engineer Eric Ziegenhorn posted a bug report saying Mozilla was experiencing problems with Hadoop, another open source platform written in Java.
He also blamed the leap second, since the problems had hit at midnight GMT.
June 1 warning
Wired.com said Marco Marongiu, a senior system administrator with Opera Software, the maker of the Opera browser — warned of the leap second bug with a blog post dated June 1.
But he said the leap second problem is nothing new as there have now been more than 25 leap seconds since they were first introduced to atomic clocks in the early 1970s.
For its part, Google detailed how it deals with leap seconds in a September 2011 blog post.
It uses a technique called “leap smear,” where it gradually adds milliseconds to its system clocks prior to the official arrive of the leap second.
“This meant that when it became time to add an extra second at midnight, our clocks had already taken this into account, by skewing the time over the course of the day. All of our servers were then able to continue as normal with the new year, blissfully unaware that a leap second had just occurred,” it said. — TJD, GMA News
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