BLOOMBERG
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A 'Leap Second' is a one-second time adjustment applied to systems to keep the time of day on
computers as accurate as possible. Without such a correction, time reckoned by the Earth's rotation
would drift away from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) due to irregularities in the Earth's rate of
rotation. The next Leap Second is scheduled to occur during the last second of June 30th, 2015.
There are many ways to apply a leap second to computer systems. Here are a few:
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Adding an extra second - 23:59:60
Extending a single second for double its length
Extending many seconds for microsecond intervals
To help make this change as transparent as possible to our clients, Bloomberg has chosen to
subdivide the additional second into 2000 increments and extend the following 2000 seconds by one
of these increments.
This means that no data with timestamps of 23:59:60 will be produced by Bloomberg systems. If we
receive any data from external systems with a 23:59:60 timestamp, we will ignore it and will proceed
as if it were never sent.
Our hope is that this consistent approach across all of our systems will eliminate any work required by
our clients to respond to Bloomberg's treatment of leap second.