After an extra second was added to the clock on Saturday to better align it with the Earth's rotation schedule, a whole slew of websites from LinkedIn, Foursquare and Reddit to Mozlila, Yelp and Gawker sites experienced technical issues.
Known as a "leap second," which is a basic one-second adjustment applied to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to keep it up-to-date with solar time, the additional second added didn't sit well with various web servers.
For example, Reddit said it was having Java and Cassandra issues and Gawker's entire site network was down for about 45 minutes. Other sites such as Yelp and Stumbleupon also reported technical trouble.
We are having some Java/Cassandra issues related to the leap second at 5pm PST. We're working as quickly as we can to restore service.— reddit status (@redditstatus) July 1, 2012
Before Saturday, the last time the clock added a second was in 2008. It's not unusual for sites to undergo difficulties processing the extra time, but overall, the process has always been a worldwide success.
The news comes just one day after a power outage from a storm in Virginia caused Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which powers sites such as Netflix, Pinterest and Instgram, to temporarily shut down.