Time Lords kill leap seconds, before they become the new Y2K bug

The Time Lords at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (GCPM)* have decided to stop introducing leap seconds, citing the likelihood they could cause problems with internet of things devices – and therefore a Y2K scale remediation effort – as a reason for the change.

As The Register reported last week, the GCPM works to harmonize Universal Time – UT1, which boffins calculate using the changing speed of Earth’s rotation – and the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard that humans use to set time.

We big-brained hominids can set standards but can’t do much about the fact that the speed of Earth’s rotation is variable.

When our planet’s spin slows, the GCPM adds leap seconds so that UT1 and UTC are in synch.

In recent years, they have even pondered a negative leap second because Earth’s rotation has sped up a little.

Like all good standards orgs, the GCPM conducts years-long debates about its work.

The topic of leap seconds has very much been on the agenda in recent years, as they’re increasingly hard to implement now that humanity relies on billions of devices that can usefully share the same timing data but may not easily account for leap seconds.

The matter came to a head at last week’s 28th meeting of the GCPM, at which Time Lords voted to end use of leap seconds.

The possibility of a negative leap second seems to have been a major factor.

“A negative leap second has not previously been applied, and it is considered to pose a high risk of causing anomalies and disruption to critical infrastructures that are largely unprepared,” the Time Lords wrote in a resolution posted after their vote.

“The preparation would create, for the industries that rely on time synchronization, a need for financial investment, whose amount is estimated to be similar to their preparations for the millennium bug.” Readers may recall that in the late 1990s, the world spent billions of dollars remediating software that, due to sensible-at-the-time memory-saving measures from the early years of business computing, couldn’t comfortably handle dates after December 31, 1999.

Historians now cite the global cost of Y2K remediation at $300-$600 billion.

It's widely thought that money was not well-spent.

The GCPM also worries about connected devices.