Quick update that might be useful to folks, especially those with ones expiring in March:

I called the Diamond desk again yesterday and still none of the 6 certs in me and my wife's account were updated yet to the Aug 2021 expiration date. Thankfully I got a really helpful agent (unlike the ones from Sun, Mon, and Tues) who was not only aware of the cert extension directive, but was able to manually extend all our certs to the Aug 31 2021 expiration date immediately.

According to her,

• There is no IT job that will just run in the background to update all certs expiration (which was my impression reading the SVP Mark Weinstein's email)
• There will be a team setup to manually update the certificates expiration dates account by account
• Diamond desk now has the ability to update the cert expiration date manually to Aug 31, 2021 (to alleviate the workload of the aforementioned team)

We had 2 certs expiring in 25 March 2020 and 27 March 2020 so it was a big relief that she manually extended it (rather than taking the chance that Hilton manually redeposits new certs to replace those with Mar 11 - Mar 31 expiration dates but failed to have a timely extension of their expiration dates manually/ automatically by HHonors)

So in short, it seems like communication plan to extend certs was way ahead of the execution plan (not sure if this was a concern from Amex or from within HHonor's executive ranks) but no complaints! This was a very sensible and the right thing to do given the annual fee and spend we have to make to earn these certs.

Kudos to Hilton's pro-activeness!