It’s time to leave the leap second in the past

This post details Meta's position and technical approach to the leap second problem, advocating for its elimination. It explains the historical context, the technical challenges posed by leap seconds (including positive and negative adjustments), and the complexities of 'smearing' the leap second adjustment across distributed systems. Meta's specific smearing strategy involves a 17-hour window using quadratic algorithms, highlighting the non-standardized nature of this practice across the industry and the operational risks associated with NTP server restarts during smearing. The post also cites industry examples of outages caused by leap seconds, reinforcing the argument for their removal.