According to reports from a number of news organizations, including Wired. com, the addition of a leap second to the Coordinated Universal Time at midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Saturday triggered a wave of Internet glitches.

As per the Wired report, the technical problems across numerous websites and computing systems were caused by the ‘extra second’ that the world’s official time-keepers added on the clock as June 30 turned into July 1.

It was the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service which made the much-necessary adjustment, for keeping atomic clocks in line with the Earth's ever-changing rotation pace. Leap seconds were first introduced in 1972; and ever since then, more than 25 leap seconds have been added thus far.

With the time-keepers holding their clocks back by one second, so as to keep them in sync with the daily rotation of the Earth, a few of the Internet’s most fundamental software platforms – like the Linux operating system and the Java application platform – failed to cope effectively with the extra second.

Going by the Wired. com report, while Internet search giant Google and other operations prepared for the leap second and remained unaffected, some of the other sites – including the news aggregation site Reddit; FourSquare; LinkedIn; Gawker; StumbleUpon; and Yelp – experienced technical issues.

Confirming that the extra second led to technical glitches at the Gawker media, Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett told CNET: "We were not 100 percent offline, but the service was very unpredictable for about 30 minutes last night."