Timekeepers Abolish Leap Second, Introduce Leap Hour at General Conference on Weights and Measures

During the General Conference on Weights and Measures held in France, experts reached a consensus to abolish the leap second and introduce a leap hour, a modification that will not be necessary for centuries. This decision comes after three decades of contentious discussions regarding the leap second, which has led to various technical problems, including a Reddit outage on June 30, 2012. Since its inception in 1972, 27 leap seconds have been added to maintain the synchronization of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) with astronomical time (UT1). The new framework permits UTC to differ from UT1 by as much as one hour before a leap hour is implemented. Jeff Sherman, a physicist at NIST, criticized Earth's rotation as an unreliable timekeeper, while Christian Bizouard from the IERS Earth Orientation Center highlighted the philosophical implications of this change. This adjustment also alleviates concerns about a potential negative leap second due to the recent acceleration of Earth's rotation, which could have led to technological issues akin to Y2K. Major companies like Google and Meta have employed 'smearing' techniques to distribute additional time in smaller increments and have long advocated for the elimination of the leap second. This vote allows UTC to diverge from astronomical time to a greater extent than previously, necessitating adjustments for astronomers and Earth scientists to accommodate the increasing discrepancy.