In 2022 the CGPM voted to phase out the leap second by 2035, citing critical-infrastructure resilience

At its 27th meeting in November 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) adopted Resolution 4, resolving that "the maximum value for the difference (UT1-UTC) will be increased in, or before, 2035." Because the leap second exists only to keep coordinated universal time (UTC) within 0.9 seconds of the Earth's rotation (UT1), loosening that tolerance effectively retires the periodic +1-second insertion — a change to how the world's civil time standard is maintained, decided by an international vote.

The stated motivation was operational, not astronomical. The resolution frames uncoordinated national and industrial handling of the leap second as a hazard that "threatens the resilience of the synchronization capabilities that underpin critical national infrastructures." That rationale is the governance-level counterpart to the concrete engineering failures the patch has caused — the negative-time-delta bug behind claim-cloudflare-2017-leap-second-outage-from-negative-time-delta is exactly the kind of desynchronization risk being cited. The same body, BIPM, that stewards the leap second also redefined the kilogram in 2019, so the vote sits inside metrology's broader move from artifact- and rotation-based standards toward fixed-constant definitions.

The resolution is also a rare case of a unit change becoming a diplomatic negotiation: it was not adopted unanimously, and reporting attributes objections to states whose satellite-navigation systems are tied to leap-second-adjusted UTC — a motivation that rests on secondary press and is routed for primary verification in question-verify-russia-glonass-leap-second-vote-motivation rather than asserted here. As a formal, abrupt reorganization of a centuries-stable standard, it is a metrological sibling to the regulatory "phase transitions" measured in claim-cricket-laws-268-years-abrupt-regulatory-phase-transitions.