World's Timekeepers Vote to Eliminate the Leap Second

International timekeeping bodies have officially voted to eliminate the leap second, allowing Coordinated Universal Time to drift as much as one hour from Earth's rotation before a correction is needed. The change ends decades of adding or subtracting seconds and replaces it with a hypothetical "leap hour" that likely won't be necessary for hundreds or thousands of years.

• Leap seconds have been added or removed since 1972 to keep UTC aligned with Earth's rotation
• The move caps 30 years of debate; leap seconds have caused outages at Reddit and other services
• Google and Meta used "smearing" to spread the extra second over time instead of inserting it at once
• Earth's recent spin acceleration raised fears of a first-ever negative leap second