Render server instances not preserving UTC

Hello community. I have been running my node service on render but I had a recent occurrence where even after saving my datetime in UTC format, when I retrieve it from the database and compare it with for instance Date.now() or new Date() on my node service, for some reason render adds an offset from the time that causes the event time to be in the past which ideally should’t be unless render is not using UTC. It has been a headache for me recently. The code was working just fine a week ago