Leap seconds have been a major annoyance to tech companies everywhere, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is now voicing its complaints. The years-long battle has seen many companies annoyed at having to adjust by leap seconds every year, but does Meta adding its voice matter?
Meta takes a stand against leap seconds
In a Facebook blog post, Meta expressed their frustration with leap seconds and feels that this is a concept that needs to end. While the company does acknowledge how essential they were back in 1972 and beyond, they feel that it’s been bad for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) over the past few years.
“At Meta, we’re supporting an industry effort to stop future introductions of leap seconds and stay at a current level of 27. Introducing new leap seconds is a risky practice that does more harm than good, and we believe it is time to introduce new technologies to replace it,” stated the blog post.
For those unaware, leap seconds were introduced to periodically update the UTC due to the long-term slowdown of Earth’s rotation. However, with the Earth seemingly spinning faster these days, Meta and other companies have been frustrated with leap seconds, hence the move to go replace them with something else.
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Leap seconds are a pain
Similar to the complaints of other companies, Meta thinks that having to adjust to leap seconds is a pain. Major tech companies have to make sure that their hardware is up to date with the UTC, which means having to add between 0.1 and 0.9 seconds to the UTC every few years. Meta has felt that pain and so have other companies.
In their blog post, Meta mentions how websites like Reddit suffered from issues because of leap seconds and having to add them on the UTC. While the company sees what leap seconds have done for the planet, they feel it's more of a hindrance now and we will need a replacement that can be better for everyone.
“As engineers at Meta, we are supporting a larger community push to stop the future introduction of leap seconds and remain at the current level of 27, which we believe will be enough for the next millennium,” writes the blog post.