Doing away with the leap second might prevent time-related computer anomalies in the future.

Human timekeeping rests on two main clocks, and they don’t always run at the same speed. For decades, the solution was the leap second, a minor adjustment added to international time to keep atomic accuracy aligned with the Earth’s natural motion. But on Thursday, the General Conference on Weights and Measures, or the CGPM (abbreviated from its French name), voted to abolish the leap second, closing a long-standing chapter in global time sync.

Most modern clocks rely on Coordinated Universal Time, a hybrid system caught between atomic time, which flows at a near-perfectly constant rate, and astronomical time, which fluctuates as the Earth’s rotation speeds up and slows down. To bridge the gap, UTC periodically inserted a leap second to keep pace with the planet. But reconciling physical planetary shifts with precise digital systems ultimately created more technical disruptions than it solved.

Computers are sensitive when it comes to timekeeping. The last few times we added a leap second to UTC — in 2012, 2015 and 2016 – some computer systems couldn’t handle it. Of the three instances, 2012 was the worst, as adding a leap second caused issues that crashed websites and software platforms, such as Reddit, LinkedIn and Mozilla.

The speed of Earth’s rotation experiences small changes all the time. While we can’t predict exactly how fast Earth will rotate in the future, the conference wrote that there’s a 30% chance we’ll have to add a negative leap second by 2035 to keep UTC aligned with rotational time.

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