Time Zone Updates for Venezuela

The government of Venezuela recently announced that they will be advancing their clocks forward by 30 minutes on May 1st, 2016 at 02:30 AM. This changes Venezuela’s standard time zone offset from UTC -04:30 to UTC -04:00. Microsoft is preparing an update to Windows which will reflect this change. We anticipate this update will be made available in early June.

Interim Guidance

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 switch to time zone “(UTC -04:00) Georgetown, La Paz, Manaus, San Juan” from May 1st, 2016 until an update is available and installed.

Once the update is installed, we recommend users to switch to “(UTC -04:00) Caracas” as it will properly account for historical time data for this region.