Outlook email "groups" have suddenly disappeared; contacts still there but no groups.

A further update...

Still no joy with old groups. The ones that did reappear still only had a few of their members.

I can report, however, that the new "Lists" integrate beautifully with Office Outlook 2016.

Once you are on the NEW Outlook.com system (and it should happen in the very near future), [note that “Lists” replaces “Groups” as the terminology] you need to go into your Microsoft Office Outlook [I'm assuming Office 2016 or at least 2013], File>Account Settings>Account Settings and DELETE your outlook.com account, close Office Outlook, re-start it and File>Account Settings>Account Settings add your outlook.com as a new account. It will take a while to re-sync all your emails and contacts, but when you do, and you go in to People and change the View to List, slide across to find the Categories header and click on that, and lo and behold, your “Lists” appear as bold items, and clicking on them will reveal all the people you added to them.

Furthermore, you can now manage those lists from within Outlook 2016 – add people, remove people, remove Lists/Groups (not sure about creating new lists/groups). Double-click on one of those bold headings will open the list, and there is an email icon in the top bar of that list, which you can click to send an email to all its members.

As for those lost old groups.. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Microsoft to restore them.

This thread appears to have gone quiet as people hopefully awaited the promised new version of Outlook.com which would supposedly fix everything.

Well, for me, the changeover happened today. Did it fix the missing groups problem?

As I reported on March 18, at least 2 of my former groups (now "lists") have most of their members missing, so NO, the rollover to the new version didn't restore the missing groups in full.

Such groups as I repaired (under a new group name) by selecting all the recipients from a previous outgoing email to that group, did roll over successfully.

Disappointing. Easy enough for me to fix as I only have a small number of groups, but for Mohammed AliAli (see above), an ongoing disaster.

Sorry to report that after about a week, one of my groups with over 100 members still only has 7 showing.

If the solution to this mess is for the changeover to the new version of outlook.com as suggested earlier in thread, perhaps Microsoft could come up with a way for people to initiate the rollover for their account without waiting for the staged rollover?

Still patiently waiting for the majority of the contacts to repopulate. Some have none some a couple.

Hi,

We apologize the inconvenience caused to you. 

However I suggest you to wait for couple of days & let us know so that we can proceed with the further steps.

Thank you.