Why did my Sever change time zones?

I reported this anomaly via the in-game bug report just as soon as I noticed this today. But I really do not understand what happened and with all the server merges going on I wondered.

Did Blizzard move my server from CST to EST?

This afternoon I logged in to get ready for my mythic run this evening and noticed that my realm time was exactly the same as my local time, but this was not the case last night…or last week or this past year or so.

My local time (EST) was ALWAYS one hour later than server time. I’m on Anvilmar server and I do know that we were getting linked to several other low pop servers judging by the listing posted today. But what on earth happened?

Did Blizzard pickup our physical server and ship it over the line into the Eastern time zone? Or what?

I cannot find anything anywhere mentioning this particular change and it messed up our run time tonight.

Could have been due to the server merge? Have you asked people on your server whether they see the same thing?

Some of the server merge announcements also said what time zones the new combinations were going to be on. Also, check your mythic lockouts if you have been just merged–previous weeks merges have had complaints.

After I noticed this, others on our server indicated the same issue. By this, I mean my local time and my server time are exactly the same, except for those actually living on the west coast and in the central time zone. No one can find any information anywhere indicating this would be happening.

Why would this happen?

There’s actually a couple of threads about this. Realm connections caused time zone changes and there was no notice about it.

Our server Ghostlands/Kaelthas had multiple servers merged into ours recently and as soon as that happened, we went from CST to EST, with no notice at all.

Announcement thread: Realm Connections -- September 17-18 (notice no mention of the timezone being changed on us).

I’ve asked on Twitter for clarification on if this is a bug or intended, but no reply so far.

It would have been nice if Bliz had announced this might be an outcome for merged servers. We have raid times set via server time and in many cases, folks can’t get on until about 9pm EST which used to be 8pm server. Mostly due to family situations, work timing, etc.

So our raid leader just announced that the new server time would be our raid time instead of the older one. Fixed the immediate problem, but caused other issues which many folks just groused about anyway.