Atomic clocks will change official time in 2027: why they will stop adding leap seconds to keep up with the Earth's rotation

The General Conference on Weights and Measures, meeting in Versailles, has approved a decision to phase out the use of leap seconds by the year 2027. Under this change, atomic clocks will no longer add intercalary seconds to synchronize official global time with Earth's rotation, effectively ending the practice of pausing planetary time by a single second.

The global modification is designed to protect and stabilize digital timekeeping infrastructure. By permanently retiring the leap second, the official time of the planet will rely strictly on atomic precision without the periodic adjustments previously required to account for variations in the Earth's rotational speed.