2015 Has A Whole New Y2K. Here's Why A Second Might Crash The Internet!

Kunal Anand
Kunal Anand
Updated on Jan 09, 2015, 19:05 IST
scott bezek clock

Before we break the bad news, here's a trippy clock gif. 

clock gif

That's how confusing it might be to some people who don't like computers all that much. Computers are used to following rules - including the idea that one second follows another. But this year, there's an extra second added to the 31,536,000 seconds that a year has. This is a "leap second" that the keepers of the world's time - The Paris Observatory - have added for a nerdy reason - the slowing down of the Earth's rotation.

Just like Y2K, where computers had a problem with upgrading their year to '2000', the leap second is going to irritate the codes quite a bit. To make it simple, on June 30, 2015, the time will be read 11:59:60 for computers who get their time from the internet via atomic clocks. The last time there was a leap second, a lot of the world's biggest sites, including Mozilla, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Reddit, and StumbleUpon saw crashes. So did operating systems and applications using Linux operating and Java.
Now here's an ominous clock gif to set the mood.

clock

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