The Chaos of the Leap Second (2012): When Time Broke Java and the Cloud
Posted on Tue 15 April 2025 in Incident Retrospectives • Tagged with leap-second, kernel, linux, java, ntp, distributed-systems, devops, sre, incident-retrospective
In 2012, a single leap second triggered global outages across Reddit, Yelp, and more. This retrospective unpacks how fragile timekeeping broke Java apps at scale, and what DevOps, SRE, and distributed systems teams can do today to avoid repeating history.
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