This applies within days as well; the time number at any given time of a day is the number of seconds that has passed since the midnight starting that day added to the time number of that midnight. Sometimes, Unix time is mistakenly referred to as Epoch time, because Unix time is based on an epoch and because of a common misunderstanding that the Unix epoch is the only epoch (often called "the Epoch"). Leap seconds The above scheme means that on a normal UTC day, which has a duration of seconds, the Unix time number changes in a continuous manner across midnight. For example, at the end of the day used in the examples above, the time representations progress as follows: When a leap second occurs, the UTC day is not exactly seconds long and the Unix time number (which always increases by exactly each day) experiences a discontinuity. Leap seconds may be positive or negative. No negative leap second has ever been declared, but if one were to be, then at the end of a day with a negative leap second, the Unix time number would jump up by 1 to the start of the next day. During a positive leap second at the end of a day, which occurs about every year and a half on average, the Unix time number increases continuously into the next day during the leap second and then at the end of the leap second jumps back by 1 (returning to the start of the next day). For example, this is what happened on strictly conforming POSIX.1 systems at the end of 1998: Unix time numbers are repeated in the second immediately following a positive leap second. The Unix time number is thus ambiguous: it can refer either to start of the leap second (2016-12-31 23:59:60) or the end of it, one second later (2017-01-01 00:00:00). In the theoretical case when a negative leap second occurs, no ambiguity is caused, but instead there is a range of Unix time numbers that do not refer to any point in UTC time at all. A Unix clock is often implemented with a different type of positive leap second handling associated with the Network Time Protocol (NTP). This yields a system that does not conform to the POSIX standard. See the section below concerning NTP for details. When dealing with periods that do not encompass