Morocco Cancels Sunday's Clock Change on Friday

Please disregard the weekend

Morocco was no stranger to changing its clocks.

By 2018, the country had a particularly active daylight-saving schedule, including adjustments around Ramadan as well as the usual seasonal changes.

The next scheduled change was straightforward:

In the early hours of Sunday, 28 October, clocks were supposed to move back by one hour.

Then came Friday.

On 26 October, Morocco's Government Council approved a decree changing the country's legal time so that the existing GMT+1 setting would continue instead of ending that Sunday.

The practical result was simple.

Millions of people who had every reason to expect their clocks to change in roughly forty-eight hours were told:

They would not.

The decree was published in the Official Gazette on Saturday, 27 October, immediately before the scheduled Sunday transition.

Time-zone systems, operating systems, airlines, businesses and anyone maintaining automated calendars now had an unusually short window to absorb the change.

The government had effectively decided that rather than returning to GMT, Morocco would continue using the additional hour as its legal time.

Later practice retained GMT+1 for most of the year, with temporary changes during Ramadan.

There was nothing physically unusual about the clocks themselves.

What made the episode remarkable was the notice period.

A nationwide time change that had been expected for months was cancelled on Friday for a Sunday morning that was already on its way.