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CloudFlare Was Hit By Leap Second, Causing Its RRDNS Software To 'Panic' (silicon.co.uk)
Reader Mickeycaskill writes: The extra leap second added on to the end of 2016 may not have had an effect on most people, but it did catch out a few web companies who failed to factor it in. Web services and security firm CloudFlare was one such example. A small number of its servers went down at midnight UTC on New Year's Day due to an error in its RRDNS software, a domain name service (DNS) proxy that was written to help scale CloudFlare's DNS infrastructure, which limited web access for some of its customers. As CloudFlare explained, a number went negative in the software when it should have been zero, causing RRDNS to "panic" and affect the DNS resolutions to some websites. The issue was confirmed by the company's engineers at 00:34 UTC on New Year's Day and the fix -- which involved patching the clock source to ensure it normalises if time ever skips backwards -- was rolled out to the majority of the affected data centres by 02:50 UTC. Cloudflare said the outage only hit customers who use CNAME DNS records with its service. Google works around leap seconds with a so-called "smearing" technique -- running clocks slightly slower than usual on its Network Time Protocol servers.
...at exactly midnight, while I was playing Chivalry. I kept getting laggier... and laggier... and then everyone "froze" and the client-side prediction took over. I was recording video and it was pretty funny. Everyone just kept walking forward, until they were in a wall, and kept trying to walk forwards.
It was interesting what the client prediction would let you do. You could change weapons. You could swing your weapon. You could throw axes (of which you have two) and they flew through the air, stuck in people, and even knocked helmets off. BUT, your axe counter never actually decreased. So you could just keep throwing hundreds of axes. The animation timings / speeds were unaffected. You couldn't "chant" or grunt. You obviously couldn't damage anyone.
Anyway, my internet was down until the next morning and even then, it still required a cable modem reset to fix the connection.
I'm still left wondering whether the decision to put a leap second on the night tech support staff are most likely to be over halfway through a bottle of JD was A) some intentional attempt to catch edge cases where leap seconds happen during a year change or B) some tinfoil conspiracy where we'll find out billions of dollars were stolen from a system where that particular edge case could be exploited or C) just made by people so socially isolated that they don't realize just how hard it is to fix crashed boxen over a crappy 3G connection in a dive bar bathroom using a phone covered in some chick's vomit while trying to keep down that pretzel you just washed down with sparkling water.
Someone had to do it.