Twenty-seven times since 1972, the world added a second to the clock—until the CGPM vote on October 15, 2026, decided to retire leap seconds going forward, starting May 20, 2027.
Because Earth rotates unevenly while atomic clocks run steadily, past leap-second insertions caused real digital disruptions (like airline booking glitches and Reddit outages in 2012). One major concern was the unprecedented risk of an untested negative leap second, prompting timekeepers to widen the UTC tolerance from under a second to a full hour—meaning Earth keeps its own time, and we’ve stopped forcing clocks to match it.
#Timekeeping #ScienceExplained #TechHistory #TheDailyGlitch #Shorts #leapsecond
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