Users reporting crashes after daylight savings time in Chile

[hollons]

Description

Daylight savings occurred this past Saturday in Chile. The time change caused Brave to crash for several users (20+ reports) across community and twitter. User's reported that it self resolved after an hour or so, and no longer crashed. Users files likely had the incorrect timestamp during this first hour, which is what caused the crashing to occur.

Steps to reproduce

1. Only affected users based in Chile when the time change occurred.

Actual result

Brave crashed for the first hour after the time change took place.

Expected result

For Brave not to crash when the time change occurs.

Reproduces how often

No steps to reproduce

Brave version (brave://version info)

1.69.168

Channel information

• release (stable)
• beta
• nightly

Reproducibility

• with Brave Shields disabled
• with Brave Rewards disabled
• in the latest version of Chrome

Miscellaneous information

Here's a link to the primary community post used by users to report the issue - https://community.brave.com/t/brave-does-not-launches-even-after-deleting-user-data/567393.

[bsclifton]

I wasn't able to find anything upstream about this - but I'm sure it's an issue in Chromium too.

The time changes are part of a presidential decree from 2022. The Wikipedia page shares time should have advanced 1 hour on first Saturday of September - and then it will fall back 1 hour on first Saturday of April 2025.

Folks reported the issue on September 7th, which is the first Saturday of September. Most people are probably not using the browser at the exact time the change happens (ex: midnight). I'm curious why the clock advancing an hour would cause an issue. It's worth noting that users who hit this condition also tried to create a new profile and that still crashed.

My best guess is that the person's computer didn't receive the time update (ex: didn't have time server set to sync with). And then one of the services we call out to (SKU SDK? update server? unsure) has a timestamp or validates a timestamp. And that check fails. After an hour the issue sorted itself out.