The Leap Second Is Dead. Time Now Drifts by the Hour

The Leap Second Is Dead. Time Now Drifts by the Hour

Versailles Retires a Half-Century Patch

A Second That Kept Civil Time Honest

Twenty-Seven Seconds in Five Decades

Then the Planet Began to Speed Up

The Minute That Broke Servers

Industry Had Argued for Years

Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon all backed abolition. "After 30 years of debates, we are ready," Noël Dimarcq, president of BIPM's Consultative Committee for Time and Frequency, said before the vote.

An Hour of Slack, Not a Second

Navigation Was Already Outside UTC

America's GPS keeps its own continuous timescale and never inserted leap seconds; Russia's GLONASS did build them into its operations; astronomers work in UT1 and apply separate corrections. Setnam Shemar of the UK's National Physical Laboratory said UT1 will keep being monitored and its offset from UTC will keep being published through established international services.

On Your Phone, Nothing Happens

The Next Adjustment Is a Millennium Away

Shemar told the Daily Mail that at least 1,000 years should pass before an hour needs adding; The Verge puts the figure at around 3,000. Whenever it comes, the world gains a 25th hour.

The Handover Has Begun

BIPM, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and national labs such as NIST will run the transition. IERS keeps watching the planet and publishing the UT1–UTC difference; it simply stops issuing leap-second bulletins. A timetable first set for 2035 was pulled forward to 2027, because timekeepers did not want a negative leap second to arrive first.