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The leap-second of Website doom!

For the Internet to work everything has to be kept in time and so when an unexpected leap second was added to the calendar on Saturday night and then Web sites around the world went haywire.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

When the big clocks on the Internet are changed, things can, and did, go very wrong indeed.

It was just another Saturday night on the Internet. But, then in order to keep the Web's atomic clocks in sycn with the Earth's rotation, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) declared that an extra second should be added to the clock at the stroke of midnight. The extra second went out to the world over the Network Time Protocol (NTP) form the master clocks and.... whoops! One site after another went down.

There's no master list of what sites went down. And, we may never know about some of them if their system administrators kept quiet about it and their sites were otherwise idle. We do know, however, that Reddit, the popular social bookmarking site, went down with a thump. The Reddit team reported 41-minutes after the site fell down that, “We are having some Java/Cassandra issues related to the leap second at 5pm PST. We're working as quickly as we can to restore service.”

Cassandra is a noSQL DBMS. It's written in Java and it's popular with social networking sites. The Apache group, which runs the Cassandra project claims that it's used in Netflix, Twitter, and Digg besides Reddit. There's no word that these other sites went down... but it wouldn't surprise me either.

Mozilla, the Firefox Web browser's parent organization, also reported that several enterprise Java programs such as Hadoop, a well-known distributed computing program, and ElasticSearch, an open-source noSQL-based search engine, had gone down. And, as those programs crashed, so did the Mozilla Web site.

Other sites that were reported as being down included StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare, LinkedIn, and Meetup. Pirate Bay, however, despite some early reports didn't go down because of the leap-second. Pirate Bay, which has been locked in legal battles that have seen it taken down in the UK and other countries seems to have gone down because of good old human error as a server was taken off line without a backup running to take its place.

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