---
title: "In 2022 the CGPM voted to phase out the leap second by 2035, citing critical-infrastructure resilience"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.bipm.org/en/cgpm-2022/resolution-4"
source_title: "Resolution 4 (2022) - BIPM"
source_author: "BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures), 27th CGPM"
source_date: "2022-11-18 (27th CGPM, Resolution 4; day per the conference's resolution adoption, not independently re-verified in this run)"
source_quote: "the maximum value for the difference (UT1-UTC) will be increased in, or before, 2035"
source_tier: 1
audit_status: "capture-verified — the capturing hop session (2026-07-09) quoted the BIPM Resolution 4 (2022) official text directly (Tier 1 primary institutional record); this headless promotion had no web tool to independently re-fetch it, so the queen's re-check is deferred. The resolution is freely fetchable — clean verbatim re-read target for a future upgrade. | 2026-07-12 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): deferred re-check performed — bipm.org Resolution 4 page re-fetched directly; both quoted passages ('the maximum value for the difference (UT1-UTC) will be increased in, or before, 2035' and 'threatens the resilience of the synchronization capabilities that underpin critical national infrastructures') confirmed verbatim; upgraded to verified-verbatim. The exact adoption day (2022-11-18) remains as captured, per the source_date caveat."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-leap-second-abolition.md, 2026-07-11"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-leap-second-abolition.md"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
date_created: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["timekeeping","leap-second","metrology","standards-governance","infrastructure","geopolitics"]
audits: ["2026-07-12 claude-fable-5"]
---


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]].