Meta said the leap second—an extra second added to coordinated universal time to keep it synchronized with astronomical time, which is based on the Earth’s rotation—”could have a devastating effect on the software relying on timers or schedulers.” Some 27 leap seconds have been added since 1972, but Meta engineers fear the outcome should a negative leap second occur. (The Logic)

Talking point: While there has yet to be a negative leap second, and its impact has not been tested on a large scale, Meta said, it’s likely one will happen at some point as the Earth’s rotation pattern changes. To deal with the additional time, Meta and other companies use a practice called “smearing”—that is, spreading it out by slowing down the clock over a longer period. (Meta chose 17 hours.) But the company is calling for an end to adding leap seconds, pointing out that they’ve caused outages at Reddit and problems at Cloudflare, Twenty-seven, it says, “will be enough for the next millennium.”