Good News – “Leap Second” – Bad News: “There are going to be issues”

Today, Tuesday, June 30th, everybody on earth will get an extra second. A "leap second", to sync up the earth's rotation with our clocks - which are off because the earth's rotation is slowing down - but not our clocks.

This has happened before, but the last time was on a weekend. According to Bloomberg News, this will be the first time it's happened during the middle of stock trading since all the markets went "electronic". Scientists have scheduled the leap second to happen at 8PM our time, which is the moment stock markets in Asia are opening.

According to some estimates, 10% of computer networks will have problems, since their clocks aren't set up to gain a random second. It's no Y2K, but it will cause some problems, somewhere.

Good luck, everybody. If you need me, I'll be in my basement, shotgun in hand, tinfoil hat on my head.

Just kidding, I'll be drinking beer and falling asleep on my couch.

Here's the story (with some of the interesting ways they're working around the problem).