U-Verse DVR series scheduled recordings are not functioning

@JefferMC the truly ridiculous part is that this same issue keeps happening in different regions.  And rather than post the problem and solution on this forum so a customer could help tech support get the issue in front of the correct team in engineering.  Att instead claims proprietary and forces customers to suffer and beg for help for months to get a solution.   As if it's a brand new problem everytime.  Best advice is contact corporate support possibly Kevin Smith (I'm not allowed to give out his cell # or i would) he was able to contact a vice president in the correct division(wouldn't tell me which division or give me his name) who was able to implement a solution within 24 hours).

@MikeInSC270 yea since its a regional issue. My region in south florida was a year ago.  Your region in south carolina is happening now.  Part of the midwest and part of california had it like 3-5 years ago.  So it is most likely a new problem for you. Att customer service is terrible in general and especially bad for uverse tv.

Att is just hoping you'll either switch to directv or ignore it and keep paying and stop bothering them.

I am told that this is a "known issue" and that "they're working on it," and the suggested work around until they fix it is to recreate the series recording (which will work until... ? ).

@JefferMC recreating the series doesn't work.  All that will do is set it to record the series with whatever episodes are currently available in guide at that time. So essentially it works for the 10-14 days of existing guide data(assuming no changed to guide)

Essentially what is happening is the bug causes it to never update series recordings automatically.   So it also won't change anything even if guide data changes, which can end up with some really weird recordings of whatever happens to be on at the time of a recording but with the correct name of what it actually recorded but in the wrong series folder.

The best workaround is to "touch" the series.  But it's a pain especially if you have more than a handful of series. Basically if you change any setting it'll manually update the series with existing guide data.  You can also change that setting right back to what it was before.  So for instance keep until space needed./keep until I delete.  

Also it's unclear exactly what is required during fix.  If if automatically fixes it for everyone when they finally implement fix or if it requires a manual change to each account.  I was unable to determine when ours was fixed since everyone on forum had already submitted account numbers long before they implemented fix.

@JefferMC Hate to be a skeptic, but I don't think that work around works.  I think I remember creating a brand new series schedule and it behaved exactly like the others that were already there. That is, scheduled what was on the Guide at the time of creation, but when new days' listings showed up, no new scheduling occurred for the program.

I agree with both of you... it's a temporary work around for a few days at a time.  When you have 80+ series recordings (like my wife does), it's not a solution at all.  I expressed that thought to the messenger, though it wasn't his fault but hopefully it will get back to the "them" behind the "they're" that it isn't good enough.  I'm envisioning an old windows server crashed in our VHO and they're having to rebuild it from scratch.

@JefferMC Have you heard anything else from AT&T?  I can say my problem hasn't gone away.

Nothing since the previous post.  I told my wife what they said and I lived to tell about it.  Makes me look harder at OTA DVR solutions.

@madmax988 @JefferMC Well, not sure who at AT&T said this a "known issue" that they are "working on it", or when they said it whether it was the truth or not.  But what I can say with certainty is the issue is still there for me.  I will be away next week and have "touched" my series definitions before leaving so in theory I'll have recordings when we return.  Still not very hopeful we'll see a solution.  Very frustrating!

I am in Indiana and noticed this problem last week.  None of my recorded series were showing up starting next Wednesday night, 4/26/23.  I rebooted my modem and DVR and called customer support three days ago.  The tech rebooted my DVR and said that there were no problems showing up on their end.  I had a really hard time making him understand what the issue was.  He assured me that my future recordings would show up and if not to call back next Wednesday.  I did do the "work around" mentioned in this thread about going to series settings and change from "first run" to "first run & rerun" and then back again to "first run".  I record the noon news everyday, so this did work.  I have a long list of series, so I did change settings on the series that are currently running but don't know if this will fix new seasons of series not currently on but will start up this summer.  I'm curious if anyone else in the Indy area is having this issue

@MikeInSC270 you misunderstand by known issue we mean that it's an issue that exists for years and is known by people it's affected.  Buried deep in att internal systems the bug is reported the solution on the otherhand is so proprietary that at&t refuses to write down the solution even in their own internal systems (Edited per community guidelines).

Have you contacted corporate /executive office of the president support?  I was trying to find the link for you in my old email notes but I couldn't find it.  They may or may not have eliminated it.  In the past there was a form you could fill out buried deep in at&t website.  They get back to either never or in a few weeks. But once I got someone it was a game changer.   I would provide his email and cell # but they have told me that's not allowed on the forums.  

If you can't find the form the other attempt is to write your letter by snail mail(I've never tried it) or to randomly email it to members of the executive teams emails you find by googling.  Which I believe are checked by the same team anyways not the actual executives and board members(although not very often). 

I'm also in Indiana, just noticed the issue last night, on 4/24  I had no recordings scheduled past 4/25. Found this thread today and read through the drama from a year ago. Then unsurprisingly saw new posts from April 2023 of others having the same issue, looks like South Carolina and Indiana, so not exactly a single region, one would think. The timing seemed to be almost exactly a year later so I wondered if it's something specific happening to the AT&T systems in April but digging into some of the older threads linked this doesn't seem to have always been the case.

I had a secondary glitch I noticed a couple times, similar to what someone mentioned last year. It was an incorrect show being scheduled to record. Specifically, I have South Park set as a series recording, to record only new episodes on Comedy Central. Sometimes (rarely) reruns of South Park will get recorded if there is no program info or original airdate as the DVR doesn't know they aren't new episodes.  Last week there were two episodes of Seinfeld recorded from Comedy Central but they were under the South Park series heading. I wondered if somehow there was a time zone glitch, like South Park had reruns airing at 9 PM Eastern but the DVR instead recorded at 9 PM Pacific, when Comedy Central was airing Seinfeld. But I failed to check the actual tv listings and find out if there were South Park episodes that it was seemingly mistaking for the Seinfeld time slot. 

@jeff6286 the incorrect shows being recorded in the incorrect folder is part of the same problem.   Since it's essentially setting series recordings but never checking to update them.  If an epsilon of a show is set to record at a specific time/date and then the guide updates a fee days later the series recording never checks to update itself.  It's funny you mention south park, because if you've ever look far into scheduled recordings south park always has extra showings set like 2 weeks into the future because comedy central will list them without episode info and without new/rerun info so it sets them to record until a few days before they air when comedy central updates the episode info to watch they actually plan on airing in that rerun time slot.  

Affecting 2 regions is even more annoying but not unheard of the initial report from 4-5 years ago end up affecting 2-3 regions across the Midwest.

It also wouldn't surprise me that it happens at the same time each year since the bug seems to be related to a clock/synchronization type issue.  Something causes the system to stop automatically updating/checking for updates for series recordings.   I suspected daylight savings as a culprit but the timings didn't quite line up, but now I realize it could be that it's set to an incorrect old year when daylight savings happened on a different day and it might make sense  that wouldn't match the rest of the system and would cause issues.

I had the same theory about DST but from a list I found we've been springing forward in early March since 2007, 2006 and earlier it was the first week of April. Could U-Verse boxes still be running off of software written before 2007 and incorrect DST dates are in fact contributing to this glitch. Who knows? 

And thanks for the logic on Seinfeld/South Park. This makes sense now that I think about it, a time slot that was pegged for South Park by Comedy Central 13 days out was later changed to Seinfeld and the DVR didn't continue to check back against the listings so it recorded the slot anyway. Totally logical now in light of the illogical DVR behavior causing the main issue here!

@jeff6286 the system runs on ancient software that hasn't been updated since at the latest 2014 so it's very possible. (The operating system on these stb is even older having not been updated since circa 2004-2005).  I'd assume the control servers run a compatible and similar aged software on the other end. Also my guess of a possible cause would be a server in the system gets reset to a default setting with the original default clock /date.  

Also realize when you the customer first usually notice the problem it actually occurred 5-14 days earlier because for most shows the guide data is correct 14 days out.  And it isn't until things don't record or record at incorrect times that you notice the issue. Which makes pegging down the day it occurred trickier.