After my e'mails got "call the Diamond Desk" responses, I called the Diamond Desk as well. The agent would not drop it and spent 10-15 minutes (with me on hold) getting to the bottom of it. She found out there has been a system failure that they are still working on and she was told it would be another "couple of weeks" before recipients got their gifted status.

I presume this means employees are backed up and it is a low priority. Conferring gift status is a manual process, not automated. (It reminds me of some of the bad old SPG stuff, where we had to wait days for a rep to manually do things like transfer points.)

She took my recipient's HH # but did not upgrade it for me.