The 1 Hour per Year Bug (But Only in Pacific Time!)
A bug in Google Docs on November 8, 2021, caused incorrect timestamps for comments made late on November 7 due to daylight saving time changes, affecting Pacific Time Zone users.
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On November 8, 2021, a bug was discovered in Google Docs that affected users in the Pacific Time Zone (PT) during the transition out of daylight saving time. Users reported that comments and replies were timestamped as being created "tomorrow" when they were made between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM PT on November 7. The issue arose because the code used to calculate the time difference did not account for the change in time zones that occurred when daylight saving time ended. Specifically, the code compared the current time in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) with input times in Pacific Standard Time (PST), leading to an incorrect calculation of 24 hours instead of 23. The bug was fixed by utilizing JavaScript's Date class to correctly compute the time zone offsets, ensuring accurate time calculations. Interestingly, this bug also had implications when daylight saving time began, but it never manifested in Google Docs since users cannot create future comments. Ultimately, this bug was unique to the Pacific Time Zone, occurring only for one hour each year due to the specific timing of daylight saving changes.
- A bug in Google Docs caused timestamps to incorrectly show "tomorrow" for comments made late on November 7, 2021.
- The issue was linked to the transition from daylight saving time, affecting users in the Pacific Time Zone.
- The bug was fixed by adjusting the code to account for time zone differences.
- This bug was unique to the Pacific Time Zone, occurring only for one hour each year.
- The fix has been in place since August 2024, ensuring accurate timestamping for users.
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14 commentsBut as another poster points out, when a server lives in one time zone and is used in another, all hell can easily break loose when deciding what to show the local user.
But imagine getting a single bug report, which doesn't provide a timezone or timestamp and essentially boils down to "I swear it said the wrong date yesterday but it fixed itself!": how much time are you really going to spend trying to reproduce it before closing it with the conclusion that the user was probably just imagining things?
The bigger problem was that I couldn't replicate it because I was in Arizona (which doesn't observe DST). Only users outside of Arizona were seeing the bug.
Huh? Unless I'm mistaken, Daylight Saving ended at 2am local time on Nov 7, 2021.
Was the bug that Day Saving is internally set based on Eastern Time (i.e. 2am ET / 11pm PT)?
In comes the DST rollback. At 1:59 AM Pacific Daylight time the task ran. At 2:00 AM Pacific Daylight time the time changes to 1:00 AM Pacific Standard time. For the next hour it just sees "ooh 1:01 AM is not more than 1 minutes after 1:59 AM, I'm going to sleep. 1:02 AM is not more than 1 minute after 1:59 AM..." and ends up falling behind for that hour until it magically fixes itself at 2:01 AM Pacific Standard Time
Unnecessarily negative IMHO to implicitly call the person who came before you a clown, especially for a bug which is so trivial.
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