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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T23:08:50+00:00

I got from various sources that Facebook stores The start and end time of

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I got from various sources that Facebook stores The start and end time of events as PST. But there must be something I’m missing. Take this facebook event which I created. I live in Italy and in fact when I insert the event time it says UTC + 2. I insert 2012-05-18 10.30 PM as the event start time. I Expect this to be saved as 1.30 PM Pacific time, because PST should be GMT -7 (because of daylight saving time). But if I do

$start = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $facebook_event['start_time'] );

$start comes out 2012-05-19 05:30:00 which is 7 hours after the time I inserted! How is that possible? what am I missing?

EDIT – this is how I retrieve the event start_time

        $fql = "SELECT 
                    eid,
                    name,
                    description,
                    start_time,
                    end_time,
                    venue,
                    location,
                    update_time
                FROM
                    event
                WHERE 
                    eid IN (SELECT eid FROM event_member WHERE uid = $id)" ;
        $events = $facebook->api( array(
            'method' => 'fql.query',
            'query' => $fql,
        ) );

I don’t use the /$id/events/ api call because I always get back an empty set when I get my friends events

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    let me explain the Facebook timezone rules,

    Facebook always assumes start_time or end_time you are sending are in pacific timezone. so its our responsibility to send them in pacific timezone.

    In above case,
    You inserted 2012-05-18 10.30 PM in EST but Facebook assumes that you are sending it in pacific time. so it converts in to UTC as 2012-05-19 05:30:00. which you will recive throuh API.

    simply fb_stored_time = epoch(UTC(assumed_Pacific_time))

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