No. 011 · Clock Room

The Extra Second

· hours, depending on who you were

  1. 1A leap second is inserted at 23:59:60 UTC
  2. 2A Linux kernel timer bug makes some processes spin
  3. 3Java and MySQL servers pin their CPUs
  4. 4Reddit, Mozilla and others slow down or fall over
  5. 5Fix: set the clock again, or reboot ✕

Time is an input. Test the weird ones.

Source: Public postmortems and kernel mailing list, July 2012

Leap second bug, June 2012. Duration: hours, depending on who you were. 5 hops from the first change to the failure.