March 8, 2026
When seconds smear, sparks fly
Revisiting Time: UT1, UTC, NTP and NTS
Earth’s wobbly clock sparks nerd brawl: “secure time now” vs “legacy won’t budge”
TLDR: Huston explains why we add leap seconds and how “smearing” avoids outages, then the comments explode over making time trustworthy. Fans say NTS brings verified time; skeptics say old devices and missing government servers make it a fantasy—important because bad time breaks logins, payments, and the whole Internet.
Geoff Huston’s explainer on leap seconds and the Internet’s timekeeping chaos dropped—and the comments immediately turned into a cage match over how to fix it. Yes, the Earth spins a little funny, so sometimes we add a “leap second.” Yes, that used to crash stuff on New Year’s. And yes, engineers now “smear” that extra second across hours to avoid midnight meltdowns. But the real drama? Who’s going to make time trustworthy.
One camp is side‑eyeing the whole ecosystem, arguing that NTS—a way to verify your clock over the network—won’t help if half the world’s routers and gadgets never get updates. They’re calling out governments too: if you’ve got an atomic clock, why aren’t you running a public, authenticated time service? Meanwhile, the hype squad insists NTS isn’t just “secure NTP,” it’s a bigger shift—think bank‑grade receipts for the seconds that run the Internet.
The thread had jokes for days: “smear the second like butter,” “please patch the planet,” and the perennial classic, “61‑second minute? My code says no.” Through it all, commenters tipped hats to Huston for making clock math readable, even as they bickered about reality versus idealism. Time is hard. Opinions are harder.
Key Points
- •UTC was adjusted with a leap second on December 31, 2016, marking the 27th such insertion.
- •Past leap seconds caused IT failures due to software not anticipating 61‑second minutes.
- •Operational practice now often uses leap‑second smearing, distributing the one‑second correction over hours to avoid outages.
- •UTC remains aligned to Earth’s rotation by inserting leap seconds so the difference stays within 0.9 seconds.
- •IERS schedules leap seconds and publishes bulletins six months before potential insertions.