BIPM Decision to Drop Leap Seconds Prompts IT Teams to Update Time Systems

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The International Bureau of Weights and Measures has decided to eliminate leap seconds from UTC, with the change becoming mandatory on 1 January 2027. Instead of periodic inserted seconds, UTC will gradually drift from TAI at roughly 0.9 seconds per year, from a current offset of 37 seconds. Organizations such as financial exchanges, telecom operators, and IoT device makers are reconfiguring NTP, PTP, and other time services to use a deterministic UTC-TAI offset rather than relying on leap-second events. The shift is driven by the risk that unexpected 61-second minutes could corrupt databases and breach regulatory timestamp accuracy requirements. Industry interest has surged, though many systems, particularly low-power devices, may not yet be prepared.

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The International Bureau of Weights and Measures has decided to stop inserting leap seconds starting in 2025, turning UTC into a linear time scale aligned with TAI. The decision has triggered a surge in online searches and debate among system administrators, IoT developers and high-frequency traders. Systems that still assume the clock may skip or repeat a second risk failures in data pipelines, trade ordering and telecom sessions. The article outlines required adjustments for NTP, PTP, databases, Java applications, scripts and IoT firmware, along with compliance policy updates. It also notes that past leap-second insertions caused outages in 2012 and 2015, underscoring the importance of the transition.

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