Wednesday, November 7, 2012
tick
Plain-text question:
Something happened in 2012 that caused, at the very least, these sites to go down. It is very likely there were far more failures than this, so I will not claim this list to be exhaustive in any way:
- Mozilla
- Foursquare
- Yelp
- Gawker
- Stumbleupon
What caused the outage?
Cracked by: Bharat Shetty, Rogi, Sumanth Patlolla, rickde and KK
Show Answer
The gurus running the central NTP servers added a leap second in 2012. This triggered a couple of obscure bugs that brought down many services en-masse, leading to all these sites going down :)