“A negative leap second would mean that our clocks skip one second, which could potentially create problems for IT systems,” Jones added.
In a blog post, Meta engineers explain where the concept of a leap second came from. And say deleting a second could cause negative effects on technology. It would most probably become a “major source of pain” for hardware infrastructures.
“The impact of a negative leap second has never been tested on a large scale; it could have a devastating effect on the software relying on timers or schedulers,” authors and researchers Oleg Obleukhov and Ahmad Byagowi, claimed.
“In any case, every leap second is a major source of pain for people who manage hardware infrastructures,” they added.
The Chandler Wobble causes problems
TimeandDate reported that irregular rotations, which speed up time, are the result of something called the Chandler Wobble. This occurs when an irregular movement of Earth’s geographical poles vibrates across the globe.
“The normal amplitude of the Chandler wobble is about 3m to 4m at Earth’s surface,” Zotov told TimeandDate, “but from 2017 to 2020 it disappeared.”
