[criddell]

I wonder if that's what electricity producers do? If you are selling 50 or 60 Hz service, an extra second here or there must really mess things up.

[lgeorget]

A few years ago, a dispute between Kosovo and Serbia caused the entire European grid to drift away from 50.000Hz down to 49.996Hz. Millions of microwave clocks across the continent ended up 6 minutes late: https://hackaday.com/2018/03/09/europe-loses-six-minutes-due....

[jefftk]

Clocks used to be able to use the 60Hz cycle to track time, and grid providers would run slightly slow or fast ("time error correction") to get back into sync. A leap second would just be part of this.

I believe in the US this error correction has been discontinued in the East and in Texas, but is still done in the West for some kind of non-clock "inadvertent interchange" reasons I don't understand.

[wincy]

Wait is that why my oven and microwave clocks are constantly getting out of sync by multiple minutes every year?

[calfuris]

Out of sync with each other, or are they drifting together in lockstep? In the latter case, yes, that's the most likely explanation.