Outlook.com Calendar birthdays sync issue

Before we ask for your email address, please tell us the things you've done so far in your attempt to fix this on your own.

I was discovering that birthdays of well maintained contacts are missing in birthday calendar and wondering about that - for weeks. Manual refresh in birthday calendar settings doesn't help.

Thanks to lamé's investigation the issue should be clearly reproducible. Meanwhile, in the German forums it's confirmed that not only linked contacts (Skype, Facebook) but also pure standalone Outlook contacts are affected and not properly synced.

Thanks.

Hi lamé,

Thank you for the detailed information that you have provided. On the first set of instructions that you have given (1-8). I noticed that is by design that the birthday of that contact will not re-appear on the Birthday calendar since the event is manually deleted.

To make the birthday re-appear again, you need to manually re-add the birthday of that contact on the Birthday calendar. To create a birthday event, just click the drop down button beside New and select Birthday.

Now, on the second set of instructions, we need to refresh the Birthday calendar to have it updated with People. Therefore after 9-12, there is a 13th step that we need to.

13. Click the cog icon located at the upper right of calendar .

   13.1. Click Options.

   13.2. Select Birthday calendar under Edit your reminder and calendar settings.

   13.3. Under Last refreshed select Refresh now.

Go back to your Birthday calendar and it should include the birthday of the re-added contact.

Hope this helps, if you have further query please let us know.

Thank you.

Hi,

I am one of those users.

I have recreated one of the problems to give you a hint of a possible scenario where the behaviour is not the one a User might expect. I'm doing all the following steps from Outlook.com People and Calendar Hubs.

This is not a troubleshoot for other Users, if you are a User do not follow these steps for your personal Contacts. This is the replication of a possible bug in the Contact/Calendar interaction for the Moderators.

1. Create a new contact in People Hub: Name Surname.
2. In People Hub, Edit Name Surname contact with any contact information; in particular add a Birthday date, for example 06 August 1985.
3. Go to the Calendar: the birthday should be there.
4. Now delete the birthday from the Calendar.
5. If you go back to People Hub the Birthday is still in Name Surname contact infos.
6. Assume you want the Birthday to appear again in the Calendar. Edit and delete and the Birthday in People Hub and save the edit.
7. Repeat step 2.
8. If you go to Calendar NOW the Birthday event will NOT appear.

I tested passages 1-8 and the results is always the same (waiting 24/48 hours doesn't change the result, nor does manually updating the calendar.)

 Instead I'm getting mixed behaviours for the following steps:

9. In People Hub, delete contact Name Surname.
10. Create Name Surname again.
11. Edit Name Surname contact information and add the same birthday date (e.g. 06 August 1985)
12. Go to Calendar: the birthday event MIGHT BE NOT there. Sometimes it reappers, sometime it doesn't (mostly it doesn't).

I hope these informations are useful to solve the issue. I think the Birthday Calendar "keeps memory" of the edits done in the Calendar Hub and any successive Edit of the Contact information in People Hub won't subvert those edits.

Thank you for your attention.

Best Regards.

Hi,

Thank you for posting in the Microsoft Community forum.

I understand you're having issues with your Outlook.com Birthday calendar. We're sorry for the inconvenience. Let me assist you.

This thread have multiple posts from different users. Some users stopped dead on their tracks and we weren't able to gather enough information from them. There's one user here who went through the troubles with us doing some troubleshooting and in the end, got this issue escalated.

We haven't heard form the escalations team though. 

The more info they have about this, the faster they can isolate the issue.

Yes, we're interested about investigating your concern. Before we ask for your email address, please tell us the things you've done so far in your attempt to fix this on your own.

Thank you.

Your issue is still escalated to our Product Specialist. We apologize for the inconvenience. We will give you an update as soon as there is a resolution.

Same here. I found some further investigations and findings in the German forums: **birthdays of contacts linked to Skype or Facebook are not properly synced.**Sometimes they appear in the birthdays calendar, but unfortunately often they just get lost, hence are missing.

Conclusion: currently we must not rely on birthday calendar, since its syncing is corrupted.

@Microsoft Are you investigating in this issue?

Would you like to have my email address, too?