On June 30, the common time standard around the world, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), will add an extra second to the day at 23:59:60 GMT.
Leap seconds are adjustments to international time that take the slowing of Earth’s rotation into account, which changes slightly from day to day.
The last leap second in 2012 meant some websites, including Qantas, Reddit and LinkedIn were unavailable.
Some flights were delayed and some cancelled.
The problem was that some web servers, which upload webpages to the internet for you to access, could not process the extra second.
The creator of popular server operating system Linux, Linus Torvalds, said people should not be worried about the leap second this time around, Wired reported.
“Last time it happened, people spent some effort making sure it was fine afterwards. Hopefully that all stuck,” he said, but could not rule out some systems would not have been tested.
University of Technology, Sydney Adjunct Professor John Leaney said there was no reason people who run websites and servers around the world could not have fixed that problem this time around.
“I can’t imagine it would be a problem of the magnitude of 2012,” Adj Prof Leaney said.
The leap second is nothing like the Y2K bug, Adj Prof Leaney said.
He said the Y2K bug was actually a problem, but was solved before 2000. In 1999, the world was running software that was not designed to be used this millennium.
“People were running software that dated back to the 60s,” Adj Prof Leaney said.
Fears around the Y2K bug stemmed from how software was written to not include “19” at the start of dates, to save valuable storage space at the time, National Geographic says.
Adj Prof Leaney said he would be surprised if the leap second problem was not fixed this time around and was surprised that the 2012 incident occurred.
Google has announced it would solve the leap second issue on its cloud systems, like the popular email service Gmail, by smearing the second over a 20 hour period rather than counting an extra second.
Google’s cloud services will be slightly different to international time during this period.
An article published on Information Week recently raised the danger of systems that relied on Google’s smear method, for people receiving radiation treatment.
Adj Prof Leaney said systems like that would likely run on an internal counter, rather than an external source of time.
The Australian Stock Exchange says it will smear the second over an 20 minute period after trading opens at 10am.
This article has been edited to say Adjunct Professor Leaney was associated with the University of Technology, Sydney not University of Sydney.
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