On Thursday, February 23, 2023, Yext began to migrate to an upgraded version of our Google Business Profiles (GBP) integration and completed the migration on Wednesday, March 8, 2023. This upgraded version contained a time zone miscalculation error that resulted in GBP Events being published to GBP with their start and end times set to 4 hours later than their actual start and end times. Impacted customers started to notify Yext Support of the issues as early as March 8, 2023. Yext Support notified Yext Engineering of the issue on March 13, 2023. Yext Engineering diagnosed and resolved the issue on March 15, 2023 and then began a process of correcting the Events published with incorrect start and end times. This data cleanup process completed on March 20, 2023 for all events whose end date had not already passed.
A code change resulted in incorrect timezone logic being applied to Event Post start and end times.
The problem was resolved by correcting the treatment of time zone data for the Event posts and deploying the affected services. Events with bad data whose end dates were not yet passed were corrected by re-syncing them with GBP. Yext will be implementing additional regression tests to prevent similar issues in the future.