i3m Blog » leap second http://internal3m.com/CMS/Wordpress Thu, 21 Apr 2016 14:54:16 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.41 The Internet died two deaths over the weekend http://internal3m.com/CMS/Wordpress/2012/07/02/the-internet-died-two-deaths-over-the-weekend/ http://internal3m.com/CMS/Wordpress/2012/07/02/the-internet-died-two-deaths-over-the-weekend/#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2012 17:30:47 +0000 http://internal3m.com/CMS/Wordpress/?p=1093 [...]]]> The Internet died two short deaths this weekend. On Friday, a thunderstorm near Washington, D.C. knocked out Amazon’s servers (which also hosts Instagram and Netflix). Last night, a leap second knocked out a good bit of the Internet.

The thunderstorm story is pretty obvious. A storm knocked out a bunch of servers and left 1.5 million in the D.C. area without power.

The leap second story is more interesting.

Once in a while, all the atomic clocks across the world pause for one second. This time it was at 12:00a Greenwich Mean Time that all the atomic clocks paused, something that has happened 24 times since 1972. Not exactly common.

A lot of electronic devices link to the atomic clock, and these devices aren’t used to seeing the same second twice. And last night, when they did, things went to hell. Many sites, including Yelp, Reddit and the Gawker family were down.

One notable one wasn’t, though. This one inevitably prepared for months for a leap second no one else even knew about. This one is obviously Google.

MORE: The Internet died two deaths over the weekend | DVICE.

 

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