Governments vote to retire the leap second by 2035

guest · Nov 19, 2022

Time is running out for the controversial practice.
By Igor Bonifacic @igorbonifacic - November 19, 2022

The days of the leap second creating headaches for software engineers are coming to an end. On Friday, government representatives at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris, France voted nearly unanimously to retire the practice of occasionally adding one second to official clocks (via The New York Times).
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Introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to reconcile discrepancies that can come up between atomic time and observed solar time, the leap second has been the bane of tech companies for decades.

Part of the push to eliminate the leap second has come as a way to preserve UTC as the world’s official international time.
With this week’s vote, dignitaries from the US, Canada and France called for the practice to end before 2035.
Russia voted against the proposal.
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Felicitas Arias, the former director of the Time Department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures told Nature the decision may force Russia to launch new satellites.
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There’s still another organization that needs to weigh in on the matter before software engineers can breathe a sigh of relief. The International Telecommunications Union, the group responsible for transmitting universal time, will vote on the issue next year. If it moves forward with “Resolution D,” metrologists and astronomers will have until at least 2135 to figure out how to reconcile the atomic and astronomical time scales.
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Governments vote to retire the leap second by 2035

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Governments vote to retire the leap second by 2035

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