US daylight saving errors pile up

Time change causes problems for vendors.

Confusion stemming from an early daylight saving time (DST) move in the US and Canada has kept many people in tech support busy since Sunday.

Users reported update issues in consumer and enterprise hardware and software, but other problems were later found not to be related to the time change.

Among the big-name companies to be hit by DST bugs were Cisco Systems, Symantec and Microsoft.

The SANS Internet Storm Center logged a number of reports from users stemming from Sunday's time change.

SANS reported that certain Cisco phone models did not display the correct time, while mobile providers including T-Mobile displayed incorrect times on phones set to network time.

Security firms also fell victim to the time change errors, and users reported problems with security and back-up software from WatchGuard and Symantec.

SANS researcher Deborah Hale stated that the problems are "nothing earth shattering or causing the internet to crash and burn, but are making things a little tense for some folks".

The issues stem from a decision by the US and Canadian governments to begin DST three weeks early in an effort conserve energy.

SANS said that it expected "just about everything to be blamed on DST", but in two instances at least this was not the case.

Hosting firm GoDaddy experienced server downtime on 11 March, but the company told www.vnunet.com that the issues were due to a denial-of-service attack.

A spokesperson for Yahoo told www.vnunet.com that a Yahoo Mail outage on Sunday morning was not related to the time change.