Tech companies want to get rid of leap seconds. To avoid chaos in our computer systems.

Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon this week launched a campaign aimed at getting rid of so-called leap seconds, the extra second added to our time reckoning from time to time to keep time in sync with the sun.

Since 1972, a leap second has been added to our time reckoning 27 times. This is something that can affect computer systems that aren’t programmed to show up for an extra second that they have to take into account. It is also the reason why the big tech companies want to get rid of the extra second that we get from time to time. Meta writes in a blog post advocating that leap seconds be removed:

“Leap second events have caused issues across the industry and continue to present many risks. As an industry, we bump into problems whenever a leap second is introduced. And because it’s such a rare event, it devastates the community every time it happens. With a growing demand for clock precision across all industries, the leap second is now causing more damage than good, resulting in disturbances and outages.”

Even the American authority US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their French counterpart Bureau International de Poids et Mesures (BIPM) advocate that leap seconds should be removed.

There is no concrete proposal for exactly how leap seconds should be removed. Currently, Meta and Google, for example, use a technique called “smearing” of time. This means changing the speed of the internal clock in your systems over a number of hours to get rid of the extra second. In Meta’s case it is about 17 hours and in Google’s case 24 hours during which time is “smeared out”.

However, there is no standardized solution for “smearing” time. Until such a thing is in place, or some other technology that can remedy the problem, we will probably continue to have to live with leap seconds. The last time we added a leap second was December 31, 2016. When the next one will be added is yet to be determined.

The last time the issue of leap seconds was discussed in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) was in 2012. At that time, the United States and France were in favor of removing the leap second, while China, Germany, Great Britain and Canada, among others, were opposed to the proposal to remove leap seconds, something that made the leap seconds remain.