We survived the leap second change

Steve Woods Bristol Wireless News, International IT News, Open Source News July 2, 2012 1 Comment »

The BBC is reporting that the leap second change and poor weather on both sides of the Atlantic last weekend caused chaos, knocking out the likes of Reddit, Foursquare and Amazon Web Services‘ cloud computing servers.

Besides, internet and IT giants, the bug also affected many other businesses, such as Quantas, whose check-in system crashed.

The cause of the failure was apparently traced to the Linux kernel, where a leap second triggered by the NTP subsystem results in a deadlock situation. The problem seemed to affect all kernel versions from 2.6.26 up to and including 3.3, according to The H Online.

At Bristol Wireless, the leap second (and weather) treated us more benignly, as we announced yesterday via Twitter.

All our #Debian servers were unaffected by the #leapsecond bug, how were yours?

— BristolWireless.net (@BristolWireless) July 1, 2012

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