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Sites like as Reddit, Gawker, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Yelp crashed after a “leap second” was added to the universal clock on June 30 in order to keep up with the Earth’s rotation. Slight fluctuations on the Earth’s axis meant that some days ended up being longer than others meaning that in a few hundred years time we’d be eating lunch at midnight if the problem went unaddressed. All it needed to address the problem adding an extra second to pull everything back into line, News.com.au reported. The extra second sent some websites into a spin. Reddit announced on Twitter that the second was causing problems with its Java, Mashable reported. Gawker’s entire website was down for about 45 minutes. Aggregator Stumbleupon and review website Yelp also reported problems. Despite the technical issues, the one-second-solution was deemed a success. The glitch followed a severe power outage in the US causing photo application Instagram to be down most of the weekend, along with social network Pinterest and video streaming service, Netflix. The outages were caused by a storm in Virginia , which caused Amazon’s servers to fail. The matter of a simple leap second also cost travellers hours and left passengers stranded all across the country. The so-called leap second was added to electronic clocks at midnight universal time on Saturday, with atomic clocks reading 23 hours, 59 minutes and 60 seconds before then moving on to Greenwich Mean Time. The Earth slowing down from the tidal pull of the Moon has meant that periodically, timekeepers have to synchronise the official atomic clocks. The last leap seconds happened in 2008, 2005 and 1998.

Extra second on June 30 brings down websites globally