Time Zone Update for Chile and Haiti

The government of Chile recently announced that they will be returning to standard time this year. Clocks will move back by an hour on Sun, May 15, 12:00 AM and move forward by an hour on Sun, Aug 14, 12:00 AM. Permanent DST was observed by Chile in 2015, remaining in UTC – 03:00 hours throughout the year. This change returns Chile to its previous standard / daylight time cycle.

This change also affects the Chilean territory of Easter Island, which keeps its time 2 hours earlier than mainland Chile. A new Windows time zone entry will be established to reflect the correct time on Easter Island.

On March 11th, 2016 the government of Haiti announced that they will not be observing DST this year. DST was previously scheduled to begin on March 13th, 2016.

Microsoft is preparing an update to Windows which will reflect these changes. We anticipate an update to be available on Tuesday, May 10, 2016.

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 use time zone “(UTC -05:00) Bogota, Lima, Quito, Rio Branco”. Selecting this time zone will correctly reflect the time in Haiti.

The new update will introduce a new Windows time zone for Haiti. We recommend that our users in the affected regions switch to this new time zone when the update is made available. Details of the new time zones for Haiti will be published in the KB article on Tuesday, May 10, 2016.