Why did my Jira Cloud instance change its time zone unexpectedly?

[John Gabriel]

I'm using Jira's API to query information from a Jira Cloud instance to populate a reporting database.  For months during development, the Created and Updated fields returned by the API were always in UTC and ended with +0000.  Last Friday, for no known reason, the API began returning the Created and Updated information in CST ending with -0500 or -0600 depending on daylight savings time.  According to our Jira admins, no setting was changed on Friday to account for the time zone change.  What could account for the unexpected change?  Can we anticipate future unexpected changes to our cloud instance's time zone?

[Matt Budnyj]

Hi @John Gabriel if the global settings haven't been changed for the cloud instance, it may be worth checking the personal settings for the user you are authenticating with for the API. If you log in as this user, go to their avatar and check the personal time zone settings haven't been set to CST. If this isn't the reason, I would suggest contacting Atlassian Cloud support.