UTC Format

UTC is a standard date and time format.

Dates

A date in UTC format looks like this:

2010-11-12

That format contains a four-digit year, a 2-digit month, and a 2-digit day, separated by hyphens (yyyy-MM-dd).

Times

A time in UTC format looks like this:

13:14:15Z

That format contains 2-digits for the hour (13), based on a 24-hour clock, followed by two digits for minutes (14), and two digits for seconds (15), separated by colons (HH:mm:ss). (The standard allows for a even finer levels of granularity, but they are not reported by or used by the platform.)

The final character in that format designates the time zone, where Z is "zero-time", or Greenwich Mean Time. (That format is used for all times reported by the platform.)

Date/Times

A date/time looks like this:

2010-11-12T13:14:15Z

That format contains a date and a time, separated by the letter "T".

Learn More

• UTC: W3C Note on Date and Time Formats
• List of Time Zones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zones_by_country