Today is the day that almost everyone in the country “springs ahead” one hour for daylight savings time. Arizona and Hawaii are notable exceptions so apart from knowing what time zone our relatives and friends in other states are in, we don’t concern ourselves too much over daylight savings time.
It seems the mobile phone networks may not be so well informed. Did you wake up this morning, check the clock on your mobile phone and think you had slept in a bit longer than you thought? Then wander in to your kitchen and see the clock on the stove or the wall? Here’s what is happening…
When you travel across time zones by air or ground, a smart phone such as an Android or iPhone will immediately know where it is. In a plane after you land and connect to the local network while taxiing to the gate the phone quickly determines it’s location using the data from the local mobile network, GPS and WiFi signals. It knows what time zone it is and then periodically synchronizes it’s internal clock with the network time so you never need to set your phone’s clock.
It seems, however, many phones recently didn’t correctly identify their location in Arizona. The phone may have been set to mountain time zone which had been giving you the correct time zone over the past few months. Phones on the T-Mobile network have been affected by this glitch and if you had left your phone on “Automatic Time Zone” settings expecting it to intelligently set the time zone by itself you would have had a rude awaking this morning.
It appears to have affected both iPhones and Android devices this morning that are operating on the T-Mobile network. The automatic time zone settings didn’t figure where the phone was and incorrectly applied the daylight savings time to phones in Arizona.
Here’s the fix…go to your phone’s settings and turn off automatic time zone selection and manually set the time zone to Arizona time. Then you should contact your phone’s network provider and complain about the glitch (or send them an email since they probably have a lot of calls this morning). Check back periodically and see if the glitch has been corrected so you don’t have to manually set the time zone next time you cross time zone borders.
Then go back to bed, it’s Sunday and an hour earlier than you thought.
