iCal calendars not syncing

Question

Hello all,

I have discussed this topic with Microsoft Support. They eventually - after multiple emails - state that they do not provide any support for using web calendars. That's a shame considering the fact that the calendars that do not work at this moment have been working just fine in the past. And especially: the same calendars are working perfectly on a new @harsh.com .com account. The problem specifically occurs on my @harsh.com .com account and I don't know why. It is also hard to tell when the problem started occurring because it is about sports calendars and during Corona there was no activity in any/most of the calendars.

This is the situation:

1) I login to Outlook.com
2) I open Calendar
3) I click on 'Add calendar'
4) I click on 'Subscribe from web'
5) I fill out all the necessary fields (URL, name, color, charm) and click on 'Import' button
6) All current items of the specific calendar are being loaded and shown in my Outlook.com calendar and the items also sync to my Outlook applications on my pc and smartphone

But: any changes in the online calendar (change of event title or date/time) and any new events in the calendars are not being shown in Outlook.com (and therefor also not in Outlook applications on pc on smartphone).

Microsoft Support gave me a couple of thing to try before they stated that they do not support the use of Ical calendars. I have tried the following:

• Remove shared calendar and re-add (situation unchanged)
• Remove shared calendar and re-add after a couple of days (situation unchanged)
• Wait at least 48 hours for a changed/added item to show in my Outlook.com calendar (situation unchanged)
• Remove connected devices from https://account.microsoft.com/devices (situation unchanged)
• Add calendar to another @harsh.com .com account (this works fine but I'm not planning to change to another account)

I have also added a couple of the calendars to a Google-account. The calendars are working fine with Google as well.

I cannot see any other conclusion than the problem being something with my account. But what? Hope anyone here can help me out.

Answer 1

Microsoft has stated: "Outlook has no plans to deprecate support for .ics/ical calendars": https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/outlook-has-no-plans-to-deprecate-support-for/f02b5803-19d2-4e4e-a7e6-9741b88751d5

Issue 'Unable to add a calendar' has been marked FIXED on this site: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/fixes-or-workarounds-for-recent-issues-on-outlook-com-8c95d913-d96b-4065-9171-e1fa44b03ff5

I have tested this with one of my calendars and this worked fine. Within a couple of weeks at least one of the other calendars will be updated so I will see whether or not these changes will be shown in my calendar.

I will keep you posted.