One second is all it takes to knock the ‘internet’ out of whack

All it takes to cause chaos on the internet, is adding a ‘leap second’ to the atomic clock. For a few terrible minutes, people the world over could not check-in on Foursquare, Reddit stuff and Instagram their pretty pictures.

According to the online furore, it seems some of the internet’s stalwarts which included the Linux operating system and the Java application platform just couldn’t take the the extra second.

After the scheduled extra second was added to the clock on Saturday to align it with the Earth’s current rotation, many websites such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Foursquare, Amazon, Reddit, Mozlila, Yelp and Gawker experienced technical failures.

Mozilla told users in a bug report that “Java is choking on leap second.” The site’s reliability engineer Eric Ziegenhorn said it appeared the two were related because they occurred at the same time. “Servers running java apps such as Hadoop and ElasticSearch and Java doesn’t appear to be working. We believe this is related to the leap second happening tonight because it happened at midnight GMT.”

Popular social bookmarking site sent out a tweet alerting users to the problem as well.

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

Gawker media sites also experienced similar problems: “We were not 100 percent offline, but the service was very unpredictable for about 30 minutes last night,” Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett told CNET.

Location-based service Foursquare tweeted about the massive outage due to a hit on Amazon’s cloud services.

Sorry for the downtime, folks. Amazon (our host) is having some problems right now. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon. status.foursquare.com

— foursquare support (@4sqSupport) June 29, 2012

You would think Amazon would have been prepared for this. Google has been slowly getting ready for this since September last year. The company seems to have adopted a technique it calls “leap smear,” and have gradually been adding milliseconds to its system clocks ahead of the official arrive of the leap second.

“This meant that when it became time to add an extra second at midnight, our clocks had already taken this into account, by skewing the time over the course of the day,” the internet giant said. “All of our servers were then able to continue as normal with the new year, blissfully unaware that a leap second had just occurred.”