Companies in the technology sector have reason to celebrate: the leap second, a time correction, will soon be a thing of the past. The member states of the Bureau of Weights and Measures, who met in Versailles on Friday, agreed almost unanimously on this.

Since 1972, the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) clock has had to be corrected approximately every 21 months to account for the gradual slowing of the Earth’s rotation. This time correction of one second, called the leap second, is irregular – like the speed of rotation of the earth – and therefore difficult to predict.

Result: Since its inception, it has caused many headaches for developers whose systems require precise timing.

This is especially true for the Reddit forum, which suffered a 40-minute outage in 2012. Its servers were suspended due to a new leap second.

Cloudflare’s DNS service blamed an outage in 2017 at midnight on New Year’s Eve for this time correction.

The setbacks caused by the leap second even prompted Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to publish a blog post earlier this year advocating its removal. The company uses a spreading technique to avoid failures with each adjustment.

” Every leap second is a major ordeal for people who manage hardware infrastructures. »

It must be assumed that this publication has reached the ears of scientists and member countries of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures who voted in favor of Resolution D, which aims to put an end to this practice by 2035.

However, Resolution D must be approved by the International Telecommunication Union, the organization responsible for transmitting world time, before it can be officially adopted. The question will be put to a vote by members in 2024.

If the measure finally gets the green light, it will apply until at least 2135. Why this year? We want to give metrologists and astronomers time to develop a system better suited to synchronizing the atomic and astronomical time scales.