Time Zone Updates for Magallanes (Chile) and Haiti

The government of Chile recently announced that the Magallanes Region and Chilean Arctic will stay on DST indefinitely. On May 14, 2017, mainland Chile will fall back to UTC -04:00 hours while the Magallanes Region and the Chilean Artic will move their offset to UTC -03:00 hours. Microsoft plans to introduce a new time zone “(UTC -03:00) Punta Arenas” in an upcoming Windows Update to address this issue. We recommend customers in the Magallanes and Chilean Arctic regions to switch to this new time zone when the update is made available.

The government of Haiti recently reintroduced DST, setting the clocks forward by one hour. DST is scheduled to end on Nov 5, 2017 at 02:00 hours.

Microsoft is preparing an update to Windows which will reflect these changes. We anticipate an update to be available in the coming months .

Interim Guidance for Haiti

Though we plan to release a data update, there is insufficient lead before the time change goes into effect.  Therefore, we offer the following guidance temporary workaround until such an update can be properly created, tested, distributed, and installed.

Our official policy statement can be found on the site at microsoft.com/time.

Until an update is made available, we recommend our customers to continue using time zone “(UTC -05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)”. Selecting this time zone will correctly reflect the time in Haiti.

We recommend that our users in the affected regions switch back to “(UTC -05:00) Haiti” when the update is made available.