On Friday night, the internet fell victim to a thunderstorm outside of Washington D.C., taking out a chunk of Amazon's servers, which plays host to sites and services such as Instagram and Netflix. Last night, the internet died again, taking down sites such as Yelp, Reddit, and even the Gawker network. But it wasn't because of the elements. This time it was because of a leap second.
Long story short, at 12:00a Greenwich Mean Time, all of the atomic clocks across the world inserted a leap second (or in simpler terms, paused for a second) so that they could remain in unison with the rotation of the planet (this is something that has occurred 24 times since 1972). As it happens, many pieces of technology, ranging from servers, to networks, to laptops, sync up their clocks with the atomic clocks. Problem is, they don't know how to handle things when a leap second gets thrown in to the mix because they see the same second twice in a row.
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