During the night of 30.06.2012 to 01.07.2012 our internal monitoring systems registered an increase in the level of IT power usage by approximately one megawatt.

The reason for this huge surge is the additional switched leap second which can lead to permanent CPU load on Linux servers.

According to heise.de, various Linux distributions are affected by this. Further information can be found at: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Leap-second-Linux-can-freeze-1629805.html

In order to reduce CPU load to a normal level again, a restart of the whole system is necessary in many cases.