Last night thousands of websites, including Reddit, ran into trouble due to the "leap second." According to some reports The Pirate Bay also crashed due to this unfortunate bug, but this is certainly not the case. The Pirate Bay's downtime was caused by other technical issues that have since been resolved.

Yesterday at midnight a leap second was added to the day – 23:59:60 UTC.

As a result, some of the largest websites on the Internet ran into trouble. Reddit posted a message stating that the site experienced Java/Cassandra issues because of the leap second, and others reported problems with Debian Squeeze servers.

Because The Pirate Bay also suffered downtime when the leap second hit, many suggested that it might be related. The topic was actively discussed on The Pirate Bay’s forum where one of the moderators took a guess that the leap second may have been to blame.

“The crash appears to have been caused by the leap second that was issued at midnight,” Velvetfog wrote.

Several news outlets picked this comment up and posted it as fact, but it was just a guess, and one that turns out to be wrong when we look at the timing of the events.

When the Pirate Bay went down yesterday we posted a quick update in our Bits section, and this was three hours before the leap second hit. In other words, The Pirate Bay downtime started hours before that of other sites.

One of the people in charge of the actual servers also confirmed to TorrentFreak that there’s no indication of any leap second trouble at The Pirate Bay. One of the server racks hosted by the Swedish Pirate Party was moved, and this took down a crucial TPB server.

And let’s be honest, If Hollywood can’t take down The Pirate Bay, why should a measly second make an impact….