Service Issue with Outlook Calendar Sharing Service

At the end of 2009, there was an issue with the Microsoft Outlook Calendar Sharing service, which enables Publish to Office Online in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. This issue delayed or prevented customers from publishing a calendar to the service.

The problem was resolved in early January and we are implementing procedures to prevent a similar reoccurrence. We want to share some background on why this outage occurred.

As part of preparing the Microsoft Outlook 2010 version of the Calendar Sharing service, a configuration error was introduced on December 21, 2009, on the pre-production version of the 2010 Calendar Sharing service. An unintended side effect of this change also affected the production service. This prevented some Outlook 2007 customers from being able to login through Outlook and publish a new calendar or update existing ones.

Although customers immediately reported the issue through our support forums on TechNet, the automated monitoring system we use to determine if the service is up and working failed to detect this outage. This delayed our ability to find and resolve the issue in a timely manner.

By January 3, 2010, the issue was resolved for all customers. Everyone should be able to successfully publish calendars to the Calendar Sharing service.

Moving forward, we are taking steps to improve our automated monitoring to ensure that this specific scenario is detected. We are also reviewing other potential areas where our monitoring might be inadequate to detect outages in the service.

We are also changing our internal testing and deployment process for the service to ensure that changes for a new version of the service do not affect existing customers.

We apologize for any inconvenience this service outage might have caused.

Ryan Gregg, Outlook Lead Program Manager
Darrin Hatakeda, Internet Platform Operations Group Program Manager