The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed.<p>When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours.<p>So I was assigned to make sure nothing bad would happen. I spent a month in the lab, simulating the leap second by fast forwarding clocks for all our different applications, testing different NTP implementations (I like chrony, for what it's worth). I had heaps of meetings with our partners trying to figure out what their plans were (they had none), and test what would happen if their clocks went backwards. I had to learn about how to install the leap seconds file into a bunch of software I never even knew existed, write various recovery scripts, and at one point was knee-deep in ntpd and Solaris kernel code.<p>After all that, the day before it was scheduled, the whole trading world agreed to halt the markets for 15 minutes before/after the leap second, so all my work was for nothing. I'm not sure what the moral is here, if there is one.