Date Field Responses Timezone change

[Adam_Cox]

I’d written a simple script for some field Supervisors to be able to pull and generate a report of who’s signed in to their jobs on a given day. It was working fine until the beginning of this week, when all the times got adjusted by 4 hours from when they actually happened.

A crewman will sign in at 9:04am, but the report will show them signing in at 1:04pm.

This is new and unexpected behavior. GMT for all is turned off on all fields, they should all be localized, and were for the previous month since release. All team members are in EST.

After some testing, it seems that Airtable is now dropping the ISO 8601 time zone adjustments. I am uploading them, but they are not being retained when the base is referenced. I am sending (and have been in the same format since the beginning of June) “2022-06-22T09:40:01-04:00”, and I am receiving back in the same API call as a response: “2022-06-22T13:40:01000Z” (Which I haven’t been until 6-20-22)

If someone at Airtable can confirm that this is “expected and permanent” or “unexpected and pending a fix”, that’d be extremely helpful.

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @Adam_Cox - FYI, this forum isn’t generally monitored by Airtable staff and any answers given are from non-Airtable staff. We’re all users and enthusiasts.

Looking at the date you input and the date you get back, I think they are the same thing. You’re sending:

2022-06-22 09:40:01 (9:40 am + 1 second) and you’re passing a timezone offset of -4 hours (-04:00) compared to UTC.

You’re getting back:

2022-06-22 13:40:01 (1:40pm) with no timezone offset (denoted by Z), i.e. UTC

i.e. the same thing, in a different timezone.

Airtable stores their values in UTC (in fact most/all apps that store dates and times use UTC), so Airtable is converting your offset to UTC.