Historical background: In 2012, the addition of a leap second already caused outages for Reddit, Mozilla, LinkedIn, and the Qantas airline's booking system. In 2016, problems occurred for the DNS service Cloudflare. And now we are talking about a situation that has never been tested.

🏛️ What Versailles Will Decide

In October 2026, the 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures will take place in Versailles (France). Fifty-nine member countries will vote on a resolution that will radically change global time.

Key points of the project:

• Abolition of leap seconds starting from May 20, 2027;
• Increasing the allowable discrepancy between atomic (UTC) and astronomical time from 0.9 seconds to one hour;
• Instead of a "leap second," a "leap hour" will be introduced—a correction made once per millennium.

Why an hour? Adding or subtracting an hour is a procedure familiar to everyone from the switch to daylight saving time. It is much simpler and safer for IT systems than working with fractions of a second.

📅 What Will Happen in a Thousand Years

According to estimates by Sethnam Shemar, the discrepancy between UTC and Earth's rotation will reach one hour no sooner than in 1000 years. By that time, time measurement methods may have changed radically, and the problem may simply cease to exist.

As computer scientist Marcus Kun of Cambridge University noted, "the rarer the event, the stronger the disruption it causes," so many experts would prefer to abandon any future adjustments altogether.

🌟 The Cultural Price of the Question

The decision to be made in October is not only technological but also symbolic. For the first time in its history, humanity is officially severing the centuries-old link between time and the planet's rotation. Sundials, stars, sunrises, and sunsets will no longer dictate official time.

But, as experts note, the security of critical infrastructure is more important than nostalgia. And if the resolution is adopted, our clocks will permanently stop "catching up" to the planet. Time will become atomic—and this may be the beginning of a new era in measuring life.