Links to shared Outlook.com calendars return status code 500

Well, I just chatted with MS Support again, and was told "I was able to talk to the higher tech already and this issue has been escalated to our research engineer. They have told me that they are still working on this as this is just a general error message and they are still checking what causes why the server is not letting you share the calendars."

And:

I understand how frustrating it is.. If you'll look somewhere even online you will find out that there is no exact resolution for this. That is why our higher technician escalated the issue to our product engineer.

Ok. So I'm frustrated enough that I just sent an email to Satya Nadella about this.

Emails to Satya do get read. Here's the reply.

Hi Richard,

I am the Director of Service Engineering for Outlook.com.  I wanted to give you an update on the issue you reporting with Calendar sharing on our service returning error 500.

We have been able to reproduce the error and our development team is working to understand the problem.  It seems the links generated return an error if the recipient is not logged into our service.  The link does work if the recipient is logged in.  Clearly, the link should always work or direct people to a login page.  I am hoping we fully understand the problem in the next day or two and a fix rolled out shortly after that.

I will keep you apprised of the progress.  Please let me know if you have questions or concerns.

In addition to understanding the problem we will be delving into why this error was not caught in testing, why the user escalations took so long to reach us and which of our service monitors missed this.

Thank you!

Sarah

Rich - congrats!  :-)

Also, please post here when you've been told that the issue has been resolved.  thanks!

Brent