just curious: is this a problem due to a bug / change in joda-time 2.13.0?

@jtjeferreira I pinned the version to 2.12.x because we are very conservative in introducing any breaking changes to stable Play releases. We have no problems in upgrading dependencies if they are patch/bug fix releases.
For me it seems this joda-time upgrade from 2.12 to 2.13 might be more then just a patch fix release - then they would have probably released 2.12.8 instead.
As long as 2.13 does not fix a high CVE or something else justifies upgrading it in a stable Play release, I can not see the reason to risk introducing a breaking change to Play.

Fair enough, I saw the failure in https://github.com/playframework/playframework/actions/runs/11087119713/job/30806582956?pr=12883 and though it was caused by joda. I guess it is unrelated then.