The Leap Second Is Dead — and Clocks Will Drift for 1,000 Years
By TechPulse USA Newsroom · October 18, 2026 One second. That's all it ever was — a single, solitary second, tacked onto the clock every few years to keep our atomic time honest with the Earth's spin. And yet that one second once took down Reddit, knocked LinkedIn offline, and left thousands of Qantas passengers stranded at check-in counters across Australia. On Thursday, in a conference hall outside Paris, the world's timekeepers voted to kill it. The leap second is dead. In its place: a leap hour — a correction so far in the future that none of us, and none of our grandchildren, will ever live to see it. The vote, at the 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in Versailles, takes effect on May 20, 2027, World Metrology Day. After that, Coordinated Universal Time — UTC, the time on your phone, your laptop, every server on the internet — will run free of the Earth's rotation for the first time in over half a century. Thirty years of argument end...