Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon join the NIST's push to scrap the leap second, which keeps clocks in sync with the Earth's rotation but can cause glitches
so Meta wants to get rid of them Mariella Moon / Engadget : Meta calls for the death of the leap second Ciaran / worthreading : Worth Reading Issue #12 Leigh Mc Gowran / Silicon Republic : Meta and other tech giants want to ditch the leap second Simon Sharwood / The Register : Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds Kyt Dotson / SiliconANGLE : Meta engineers join tech industry efforts in calling for no more leap seconds Tweets: Paul Ganssle / @pganssle : Regardless of whether it's easy or possible to deal with leap seconds, I 100% endorse the idea that no new leap seconds should be introduced into UTC. I have struggled in vain *for years* to find anyone for whom leap seconds in civil time are a benefit. https://twitter.com/... Dr Jaundice Peterson / @gordypls : It creates more problems than it solves FOR THEM. Also key government agencies in 1897 tried to legislate a fixed real value for pi so they can sit the fuck down. https://twitter.com/... Amit Paranjape / @aparanjape : Hmm...while Y2K is history, ‘leap second’ (introduced in 1972) is still an issue. “Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon launched a public effort to scrap the leap second, an occasional extra tick that keeps clocks in sync with the Earth's actual rotation.” https://www.cnet.com/... Wes Felter / @wmf : Yesssss, cancel leap seconds! https://engineering.fb.com/... Wes Felter / @wmf : And all the discussion on Orange Website is “This must be bad if Facebook is proposing it”. 🤦 Corey Quinn / @quinnypig : These four companies no doubt will have a “Phase 2” wherein they lobby to have UTC switched to Pacific time and everything else derives from there... https://twitter.com/... @pitdesi : It's annoying for computers, which rely on timekeeping servers to schedule events & record sequences of activities like adding data to a database. This sometimes leads to internet outages. Meta ($FB) argues we should stop the leap second altogether. https://engineering.fb.com/... Sasha / @softminus : They're right: (TAI, leap offset) should get adequately blessed and used as the timescale for distributing/processing time instead of UTC, leap seconds should be managed the same way that other non-{continuous, monotonic, reversible} time changes happen: time zone mechanisms https://twitter.com/... Tom Moor / @tommoor : “One of many contributing factors to irregularities in the Earth's rotation is the constant melting and refreezing of ice caps on the world's tallest mountains” TIL. https://engineering.fb.com/... Mike Schroepfer / @schrep : I didn't even realize we had leap seconds but our teams have a convincing augment as to why they should be left behind! https://engineering.fb.com/... @qntm : Facebook developers are apparently so frightened of a negative leap second that they think altering the way global timekeeping works is easier than fixing their code https://engineering.fb.com/... @newsyc100 : Its time to leave the leap second in the past https://engineering.fb.com/... (http://news.ycombinator.com/ ...) @brian_henderson : A discussion of complaints centered on “Leap Seconds” Just wait until these people discover there are actual leap days, and leap years. 🤯 ⏳⏱💫 https://twitter.com/... Sean Redmond / @rdmond : So much OMG https://engineering.fb.com/... Rich Miller / @tech_journalism : Tech Giants Unite Against the Leap second: https://www.cnet.com/... Michael Gartenberg / @gartenberg : Zuckerberg now looking to control the calendar https://engineering.fb.com/... Stephen Shankland / @stshank : Down with the leap second! So say Meta, Google, Microsoft, and US and French standards bodies who thinks tweaking atomic clock time for the Earth's rotation causes more problems than it solves. Key government agencies agree. Tip @Techmeme https://www.cnet.com/... Thanks: @stshank
Context & Ripple Effects
Every few years, the leap second forces the same fire drill: the 2012 occurrence caused service outages that companies were still patching software for in 2015. Meta's proposal, now backed by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon alongside NIST, aims to end that cycle at the source rather than keep hardening systems against a one-second discontinuity that arrives without warning.
It is also another instance of the largest platforms moving as a bloc on technical and policy questions — the same collective posture behind the industry push to limit Section 230 — but this time aimed at a global timekeeping convention rather than a legal one.
First-order effects
- Engineers at Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon can stop building and testing leap-second handling into their infrastructure if NIST's proposal ends the practice, removing a recurring patch cycle like the one that followed the 2012 outages.
Second-order effects
- Smaller operators and customers who sync their clocks to big-cloud time sources inherit the change without voting on it, since the hyperscalers' timekeeping defaults effectively become the industry's.
- Vendors and standards bodies that sell or mandate leap-second compliance lose a differentiator as the four largest infrastructure operators converge on dropping it.
Third-order effects
- If the proposal holds, civil timekeeping permanently decouples from the Earth's rotation, and the accumulated drift between atomic and solar time becomes a future standards decision that someone — likely the same bodies now weighing NIST's proposal — will eventually have to settle.
The trend: The largest cloud and platform operators are increasingly setting global infrastructure conventions directly with standards bodies, from timekeeping to internet law.