Incident · Jul 1, 2012

Relays stopped forwarding after a leap second

A leap second added at midnight UTC caused relays to stop forwarding messages until they were restarted.

What happened

A leap second was added to the world’s clocks at the end of June 30, 2012. A fault in the operating system used by most relays caused them to stop forwarding messages until they were restarted by hand. There were 12 relays at the time, and it took one hour and fifty minutes to restart them all.

Relays now smear leap seconds across a day, and we test for them in advance.