BIPM to abolish leap seconds from 2025, prompting infrastructure timing changes

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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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