We’ve all heard of the leap year, where we add a day, but a leap second? It exists, and yesterday the Masters of Time deployed this seemingly innocuous tool to bring the Earth’s clocks back in sync with the planet’s rotation — and crash the Internet. A list of those affected:
- Gizmodo (and the rest of Gawker Media)
- 4chan
- FourSquare
- Linux
- StumbleUpon
- Yelp
- Meetup
- Pirate Bay (which claims its downtime was caused by “other technical issues“)
See also: Australian airlines Qantas, whose global reservation software shorted out, delaying at least 50 flights.
