Due to the Earth’s rotation, on Saturday there was a leap second at around midnight GMT. And it screwed just about everything up.
Among the sites taking a hit were pretty much everything you’ve ever used on the Internet:
Many of the most popular sites and applications on the internet were not prepared for the leap second adjustment, and many of them saw widespread outages as soon as the adjustment took place.
Reddit, Gawker media sites, StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare, LinkedIn, and Meetup were among the many sites affected for some time.
Our first question is “Who the hell is browsing LinkedIn on a Saturday evening?” Seriously. Either you are hard, hard up for a job or literally have no life. Secondly, “why couldn’t this have killed Instagram even harder?”
Believe it or not, people did not fill their underwear with unnameable waste on Twitter over this — most of the sites were down for only minutes, and Facebook, Twitter, and Google all were able to take the hit simply by adding milliseconds to their clocks as the day wore on.
So we guess the moral of the story is that if the Internet takes your toys away on Friday, you’ll be inured to it by Saturday.