Nothing was supposed to happen. Like, literally nothing. Last year, the Mexican government agreed that it would abandon its biannual ritual of resetting clocks for daylight savings. Until last year, clocks in the country would be moved forward by an hour at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of April and then back again months later.
This year everything was meant to stay the same — but on April 2, a bunch of stuff went haywire anyway. Mexican social media lit up with doubt and confusion. Stories about missed appointments abounded, as some gadgets stayed put while devices that were too smart for their own good updated the time unnecessarily.
The cascading effects got pretty bad for some: Many people said they lost access to their online banking services for days as their phones decoupled from their bank’s operating system. Massive companies, like the convenience store (and fintech) giant Oxxo, gave out receipts with the wrong hour printed on them. A source working for Amazon told me that his team had to pull a stressful all-nighter as their Mexican fulfillment operations were under a threat of crashing when their software came to believe that 2 a.m. was actually 3 a.m. on Sunday night.
He reckoned that given that those in charge of updating the software were based in the U.S., the solution to the issue had been particularly slow. “Had this happened stateside, they would have sorted it out immediately,” he said.
Second-guessing any tech that may have automatically made the time shift, people resorted to primitive forms of telling the time. Out came analog wristwatches, dug out from the depths of dusty old drawers. Some dialed 030, a delightfully retro, automated phone service that tells you the exact time. (Though when I rang 030, it was off by a minute by my laptop’s reckoning, so now I’m really lost.)
As always, the confusion and chaos led to some great memes. My favorite was one that questioned our ability to deal with the massive changes in technology of the coming years — namely AI — given our struggle to cope with a nonevent like the end of daylight savings.
