Birthdays Disappearing From Outlook.com Calendar

I am also having this problem of birthdays disappearing. Very frustrating.

Hi Bruce,

I apologize for the delay in response.

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Thursday January 15 10:06 EST

Manipulated Calendar: 23 of 53 Birthdays Continue to be missing.  Refresh Details equivalent to Open Date and Time of Calendar.

Test Calendar: ALL 53 Birthdays continue to display normally.  Refresh Details equivalent to Open Date and Time of Calendar.

No additional testing for calendar discrepancies planned.

Future Monitoring of the above will only be posted at the thread "Birthday Calendar Incidents"

I did get a response.  A technician is trying to reproduce the problem.  I'll pass on anything else I receive.

I may not be able to explain it all, but I sure can explain some of it.  After extensive testing with my birthday calendar, I have found that every time you touch a People Hub record that has birthday information, you will in effect cause the birthday to disappear from your birthday calendar.

I performed the following tests on my calendar for people who had a birthday in their People Hub record:

1. If the person is already assigned to a group, delete him from the group.
2. Change a person’s existing birthday to a new birthday in the People Hub.
3. Change a person’s first name in the hub record.  Just add a few letters to his existing name.
4. Delete any notes you have about the person in the hub record.
5. Put 2 or three persons into a new group. Check the group in the People Hub. If you click on it, the group members will display in a pane to the right of the contact list.   Then delete the group without removing any of its members.
6. Add a person who has no group assignment to an existing group.

Before you conduct these tests for yourself do the following:

1. Click on your Calendar Hub to open your main calendar
2. Click on the cog wheel (upper right)
3. Click on Options in the drop down dialogue box
4. When you get to the options page point to the word birthday in the displayed calendars at the upper left and click on the word.
5. This will bring you to the Settings Page for the Birthday Calendar.
6. Midway down the page you will see the words Last Refreshed. Under those words are a date and time.  Beside them are the words Refresh Now.  Click on Refresh Now.  You will see the time and date change to your computer’s current time and date.
7. Close out of the calendar.
8. Wait approximately 15 minutes.

To Perform the tests do the following:

1. Open your calendar and select names of people that are displayed.  Keep track of their birthdays.
2. Close the calendar and go to the People Hub and make adjustments as noted above.
3. When finished, close the People Hub and open the calendar hub.  Check to see if the names are still displayed (they should be)
4. Click on the cog again and repeat the steps to manually refresh your calendar.
5. Go back and check the names after the re-fresh.  They should have disappeared.

Now I don’t use social media or skype so I don’t know what effect those programs might have on your People hub records.  I could not test for that.

I was also able to bring people back by doing a lot of clean up in my Hub Files. At one point I got all 52 of them back, but I don’t know what influence the Refresh Now option had on that process. That was early on in my testing, and the steps I used were not well controlled.  You can read my post about those efforts

By doing the above tests I was able to ‘vanish’ 13 more records from my calendar. Add those to the 8 that I had already ‘vanished’ and that left 21 of 53 gone.

I also created a brand new calendar in another outlook.com account.  The People Hub of that account was empty and I added each record with a birthday as if it were a new contact.  I included the birthday information at the time I was adding the record.  That Calendar continues to remain stable with all 53 names being displayed in the birthday calendar.

I don’t know what causes the calendar to refresh on its own.  I have watched it and there might be some type of auto-refresh at specific intervals.  You want to make sure when you do your tests, that you are doing them after the Last Refreshed Date shown in the settings page and that you manually refresh by hitting refresh now when you want to see the names disappear.  Until you refresh manually or the system does it auto refresh, the names you have touched will show on the calendar.

Similarly if you add a birthday to a person who does not have one, The calendar will not show the birthday until you do the refresh.

I would be interested in knowing if anyone can repeat these results in their calendars as that should give the Microsoft engineers an opportunity to design a testing plan of their own.

After about 20 tries, it actually worked. I replied Ravinath's PM in the end.

If this support forum doesn't work as it should, it's no wonder the calendar has problems. In fact, I am amazed I even got this far, on the internet and all that, using a MS product :)

What the heck happened, I don't know, as most MS products of old were rock solid.

PS. To post this message I had to refresh the page like 3 times, as it simply would not do anything when clicking the submit button. The wonders of the MS support forum on IE11 under Windows 8.1, I guess.