Canada froze its clocks, and Microsoft told admins to pretend they're in Bogota
Microsoft's Canada timezone troubles leave admins fixing calendars
Parts of British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba stopped observing seasonal clock changes on November 1, but Microsoft's software hasn't caught up. Outlook calendar entries don't shift automatically, recurring meetings reset when time zones are edited, and Power Automate and Fabric users are told to fake their location — Saskatchewan, Arizona, or Bogota for Manitobans. SharePoint On-Prem fixes arrive November 10, Power Pages by December 12. One sysadmin wrote roughly 900 lines of PowerShell to cope.
Microsoft published its guidance on October 26, less than a week before the change took effect, and was still adding affected products and workarounds four days later.
- enjoyyourlife
The tz commits:
September 22 for Manitoba https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/cd706278466a3ad431f0ad39...
July 8 for Alberta: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/ddcb5fa20791c3c5f1a15194...
April 22 for British Columbia: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/8b46071fd85a7a9434d63894...
Microsoft doesn't use tzdata
- IsaacAzuelos
Albertan here. The problem wasn't just rolling out the changes (and needing staff to actually install updates and restart).
Even if you update your Windows settings to say the new correct time zone, it still doesn't go back and update the time zone that future Outlook meetings are scheduled for.
I noticed that my personal calendar on my phone seemed fine, and iOS seems to book meetings based on a TZ identifier (America/Edmonton) rather than offset or a name like 'Mountain Time.' That system seems to have worked well in this case.
It's tricky, do you want future meetings to follow the city they're in, or do you want past meetings to properly track when they happened across zone redefinition (and what even is correct)? There's no simple way to get this right everywhere.
I still think the path Outlook took wasn't ideal for the majority of their customers in the effected places though.
- doorpheus
Its not that hard to get right. I'm a software dev working in Vancouver and our team was able to track all our timezone dependencies and account for the new offset. The Microsoft team definitely has some organizational issues since they've had 7ish months to fix this.
- Shank
I'm genuinely curious as to how fast this was handled by Apple devices, Linux, etc. With enough advance notice, I don't see this being that terrible to patch. Was it lack of advance notice?
- barbazoo
We have Yoto devices for our kids and they haven't updated either, their America/Vancouver timezone fell back an hour last weekend. There is no UTC-7 or the proper Pacific time timezone. Frustrating, this was known for so long.