I was aware of leap seconds after working for an online auction website. How to deal with all the auctions that may be ending right at or before the leap second?
Our solution was simple: temporarily pause all the auctions :)
We already had site-wide "auction pause" code as a result of people DDOS'ing the site.
Well, well i was working in a major bank, in HFT dpt.
We had team all over the world.
Our cisco switch were not able to deal correctly with leap second, so basically we had to switch them off just before the leap second, and switch them back on, right after.
Everything went as planned on our side of earth. But our local asian in Japan, managing several colocations in Asia (Jp/hk/singapore/india...) were thinking this leap second was at midnight LOCALTIME.
I just remember the mess they had to deal with, the day after. Cause midnight UTC is not midnight in Japan, hft is over sensitive to time coordination. shifting forward or backward 1sec can close your connection to market.
Our solution was simple: temporarily pause all the auctions :)
We already had site-wide "auction pause" code as a result of people DDOS'ing the site.