New Outlook Scheduler Does Not Load Calendars

Question

New Outlook scheduling assistant is not usable. More than half of the time it does not load calendars for me and I either have to ask someone else to reschedule meetings for me (humiliating) or scroll through every attendees calendar manually to find a new time (waste of time). Is this ever going to be fixed?? It's been doing this ever since I switched to New Outlook months ago.

Answer 1

Hi Megan,

Thank you for sharing the details and screenshot. Issues where the Scheduling Assistant in Microsoft Outlook (New Outlook) does not load attendees’ calendars can sometimes occur due to synchronization problems, cached data, or temporary service issues.

You can try the following steps to see if the behavior improves:

1/ Restart and refresh the Outlook session

• Close Outlook completely
• Reopen it and try creating the meeting again in Scheduling Assistant

Sometimes the calendar availability information does not refresh correctly until the client reconnects to the service.

2/ Sign out and sign back in

• Open Settings in Outlook
• Sign out of your account
• Restart Outlook
• Sign back in and test the Scheduling Assistant again

This forces the client to re-establish calendar service connections.

3/ Verify the issue in Outlook on the web

Please try scheduling the same meeting using Outlook on the web: https://outlook.office.com

If the calendars load correctly there, it may indicate a client-side issue specific to the New Outlook application.

4/ Switch back temporarily to Classic Outlook (if available)

If your organization still allows it, switching back to the classic version of Outlook can help confirm whether the issue is specific to the New Outlook experience.

5/ Check calendar availability permissions

If specific attendees’ calendars consistently fail to load, it may also help confirm that:

• Their calendars are not set to private visibility only
• Your organization allows free/busy sharing between users

If the issue continues to occur frequently, it would also be helpful to submit feedback here: Outlook · Community

This sends diagnostic data to the product team so they can investigate recurring scheduling assistant issues.

If you can share whether the problem also occurs in Outlook on the web, that would help narrow down whether this is a client-side issue or a service-related behavior.

Answer 2

The issue described (Scheduling Assistant not loading attendee calendars reliably in the new Outlook for Windows) is not documented in the provided context as a known or fixed bug for the new Outlook. The only closely related documented issues involve:

• Missing calendar events in Scheduling Assistant in Outlook for Microsoft 365 (classic), which has already been fixed in service builds starting with 15.20.6163.000.
• Free/Busy showing slashed lines in Scheduling Assistant in older Outlook versions, with a workaround and a service-side fix.
• An error when opening room mailbox events from Scheduling Assistant in Outlook for Microsoft 365, where the current workaround is to use Outlook on the web.

Because the problem with the new Outlook scheduler intermittently failing to load calendars is not covered in the available documentation, there is no official fix or status that can be provided from this context.

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References:

• Calendar events missing in Scheduling Assistant
• Free/Busy shows slashed lines in Scheduling Assistant
• Error when opening calendar events in a Room mailbox from Scheduling Assistant