In the early hours of the morning on January 26 this year, alarms started going off in the operations centres of the world’s telecoms companies. For a few frantic hours, their engineers tried to resolve a problem that threatened to crash mobile networks and bring down critical infrastructure.
The problem? Far above their heads, global positioning satellites were broadcasting a time that was out by 13 millionths of a second. And the world’s banks, communications networks and broadcasters got very confused. You’re 13 microseconds late again …
