On June 30th, 2012, in order to keep the time of day close to the mean solar time, a second was inserted into our calendars. So here in Montreal, clocks showed 19:59:59, then 19:59:60, then 20:00:00.
You might guess that a leap second can disturb the highly-dependant-on-time computing world, something like Y2K.
You would be right.
In fact, several web services were affected by that time distortion;
Reddit, Wikimedia, Mozilla to name a few… and us.
Our analysis systems thus became confused for a while, and new Tweets could not be fetched; fortunately we have recovered most of them, using the current means we have for time travel!
Leap second seldom occur: only happened three times so far in this century. We’re happy to say the underlying technical fix is on its way into our infrastructure.
Thank you for your patience in this matter.
