Outlook Internet calendar subscribers, bad news: Reports indicate subscription feature’s best days are over
New features are born, and old features are culled.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
What you need to know
Update October 14, 2021 at 4:20 p.m. ET:Inone of the Microsoft Community threadsreferenced in the original article, a Microsoft employee has now stated that these calendar issues are being investigated and that “Outlook has no plans to deprecate its support for .ics/ical calendars, holidays, and professional sports team schedules.”
If you’re a big fan of Outlook’s online, external calendar subscription feature that enables you to stay effortlessly synchronized with someone else’s calendar, bad news: You’ll now have to settle for calendar importation, as subscribing’s best days are over.
This development came to light as a result of multiple Microsoft Community posts reporting that calendar subscriptions were no longer working as intended, which were spotted byDirk Hoffmann(viaWinFuture). Across the posts, one managed to net anactual confirmationfrom a Microsoft agent. It goes as follows: “It has been confirmed that the calendar can no longer be subscribed. At this point, we would recommend that you import the calendar as follows instead.”
The Microsoft agent then outlined how to import a calendar, which, as one can imagine, is not what the affected users in the forum cared about.
English language Microsoft forumsreport the same situation, signaling that Microsoft appears to have given the subscription feature the deprecation treatment.
There’s no statement on why this is happening, and outside of a Microsoft agent’s confirmation, there aren’t any official blog posts or news blasts indicating that itishappening in the first place, though lots of user reports are bringing that fact to light in the meantime. Whether the situation is all a big misunderstanding or something equally peculiar that results in the feature being properly re-implemented remains to be seen, but based on the currently available information, it appears Outlook calendar subscribers are out of luck.
Get the Windows Central Newsletter
All the latest news, reviews, and guides for Windows and Xbox diehards.
Robert Carnevale is the News Editor for Windows Central. He’s a big fan of Kinect (it lives on in his heart), Sonic the Hedgehog, and the legendary intersection of those two titans, Sonic Free Riders. He is the author ofCold War 2395. Have a useful tip? Send it to robert.carnevale@futurenet.com.
