The gatekeepers of time, a team of French dudes whose press release is the most l33t thing I’ve seen in my life, have announced that 2015 will not be 31,536,000 seconds as it usually would be, it will be 31,536,001 seconds long. You keep telling your mates you never have time to do anything; here you go.
The fateful +1 second will occur on June 30 this year, where at 23:59:59, atomic clocks will tick over to the absurd time of 23:59:60, life will flash before your eyes, outer-body enlightenment will ensue, and then 00:00:00 will roll around so you can breathe again, you freak.
The bonus second has been added in order to maintain atomic clocks’ alignment with terrestrial clocks, a sentence I just wrote without understanding any of it, but sure, let’s not risk it.
The tricky part of the leap second that will occur is obviously not quite a Y2K level freak out, however the extra time does threaten to srsly fuck things up, internet-wise, so this is a pretty big deal. Leap seconds have been put in place since 1976, with the 2015 bonus second being the world’s 26th, and the last one having occurred in 2012.
In 2012, phys.org reports that major sites like Foursquare, LinkedIn and Reddit briefly crashed because of the unusual time shift.
Basically, if this thing can break the internet, for the love of god: stock up on canned goods now.
via The Verge.
