Microsoft Canada Timezone Bug Forces Admins to Fake Bogota

What exactly broke with Microsoft's Canada timezone support?

On November 1, parts of British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba stopped observing seasonal clock changes, locking those regions permanently to UTC-07:00, UTC-06:00 and UTC-05:00. Microsoft's software, from Outlook to SharePoint, wasn't fully ready.

The immediate pain is in Outlook. Switching to the new Canadian time zones doesn't automatically update existing calendar entries. That means any meeting scheduled after November 1 could be an hour out of whack, and only the organizer can fix meetings that involve other people.

Recurring meetings are worse. Changing the time zone resets any previously moved occurrences, so those have to be recreated from scratch. If your calendar is a wall of weekly stand-ups and monthly reviews, clear your afternoon.

Microsoft says it's working on an Exchange Online PowerShell cmdlet to remediate non-recurring meetings, but that's not due until later this week. A fix for recurring meetings is still 'in development' with no confirmed ETA.

The workaround is to pretend you're in Bogota

For Power Automate and Fabric, Microsoft's temporary fix is to switch your time zone to a different region entirely—Saskatchewan, Arizona, or for Manitobans, Bogota.

It sounds like a joke, but it's the official guidance. Depending on the product and province, admins are being told to set their time zone to a place that shares the correct UTC offset. For Manitoba, that means Bogota.

SharePoint On-Prem customers have to wait until November 10 for the correct time zones to arrive. Power Pages users might see server-formatted dates an hour off until a service fix lands, currently targeted for December 12.

One sysadmin on Reddit called Microsoft's guidance 'terrible' and claimed to have written roughly 900 lines of PowerShell to change users' Outlook settings and manually adjust calendar events. Others described switching systems to Saskatchewan time while waiting for Microsoft's new zones to settle in.

Why this keeps happening

Governments change time zones, and software struggles to keep up. Microsoft has been here before—in 2022, Chile delayed its daylight saving switch and Windows clocks went wrong.

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. Admins were urged to test calendars, recurring meetings, and schedules before November 1, leaving little time to find out what might break.

The pattern is familiar: a government decides to fiddle with time, and enterprise software pays the price. This time, the fix stretches into December, and the workarounds are as creative as they are awkward.

What it means for you

If you're in the US, UK or EU, this bug won't affect your time zone directly, but it's a reminder that time zone changes can ripple through Microsoft 365. If your organization works with partners in British Columbia, Alberta or Manitoba, double-check meeting times after November 1.

Microsoft's fixes are rolling out through November and December. Admins outside Canada should watch for similar issues if their regions change time zone rules.

The Canada time zone mess is a textbook example of what happens when governments change the rules and software vendors lag behind. For admins, the next few weeks will be a grind of PowerShell scripts and manual calendar edits. For Microsoft, it's another reminder that time, like taxes, is never simple.