The leap second is on its way out — and its replacement is a much bigger jump.
Per a report by the German tech outlet heise online, the mechanism that has been used since 1972 to keep Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) aligned with the Earth's uneven rotation is being retired. The successor concept is a "leap hour": instead of inserting a single second every year or two, civil timekeeping would be corrected by a whole hour at extremely long intervals.
Background: UTC is built from atomic clocks, which are extremely stable, while the Earth's rotation is not. The two therefore drift apart, and leap seconds papered over the gap. In 2022 the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) decided that inserting leap seconds should stop by 2035 and asked the timekeeping bodies to work out how to handle the growing difference instead.
A one-hour correction is attractive precisely because it is so rare. Rather than a fiddly second appearing in software once every year or two, systems would face a single, large, well-publicised adjustment — one that operating systems, databases, financial exchanges and satellite navigation could plan for decades in advance. The trade-off is that UTC would no longer track the Sun exactly in between, which matters mainly to astronomy and to anyone who insists that noon be noon.
For engineers, the practical meaning is a slow defusing of one of the most reliably annoying problems in computing: leap seconds have caused real outages at large internet services in the past. Whatever the final design, the direction of travel is now clear — fewer surprises, larger and rarer.
Reported by heise online. The final timetable and the exact size of the future adjustment should be checked against the official CGPM and BIPM documents; this report should be treated as a signal of the agreed direction rather than the finished specification.
