Microsoft's Canada timezone troubles leave admins fixing calendars

yipinwong

That stupid "special" timezones in Canada messed up Microsoft (they got their issues for not keeping their record stragith). This is what happens when a part of country does not follow. China is the other extreme. They got one stupid timezone, so one part of the country is dark AF, but then other side is daylight. This all comes down to whoever is running the government. US should also abolish stupid daylight savings, but northern politicians do not want while there is bipartisan agreement to make the savings time permenant.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

jasomill

I still choose the "America/New_York" / "Eastern Time (U.S. and Canada)" time zones when setting up systems in Indianapolis because "America/Indiana/Indianapolis" / "Indiana (East)" adds nothing but the possibility of error. Indiana started observing DST in 2006. Bad memories die hard.