Over the weekend my Outlook categories have disappeared from the Categories list. How do I get them back?

Hi....In short, nothing has been resolved.

Microsoft are well aware of the problem, but have not provided a fix in over 12 months.

I personally spent hours on the phone with their technical team last year, and at one point it looked like they found a fix, but at best it only restored about 50% of categories, and only for a small group of people.

That was August 2024.

Since then, nothing has happened.

As of February, which was my last interaction with them, they are apparently pushing an update to outlook (web and app version) in June/July of this year. Apparently this will add a host of new features, including the ability to manage categories more efficiently.

Whether this will fix the underlying issue remains to be seen.

Until then, assume that categories is well and truly broken, and is virtually unuseable.

Sorry.

I think we have to accept that Microsoft lack either the ability, or the motivation, to fix this.

If we were a Boeing, Pepsi or Blackrock, I'm sure Microsoft would have been all over this, but we're a collection of small-to-medium enterprise users that MS really do not give a **** about.

I lost my categories six months ago.

Two years of meticulously categorising, across nearly 4,000 contacts, all gone.

I know for a fact that we lost a £17,000 sale in November because of this.

My guess is we've lost a lot more.

At the start of this year, and with a high level of begrudgery, I started to create a new set of categories, and have begun the slow, complex, painful and extremely time consuming process of recategorizing our address book data.

My biggest fear is that Microsoft either find a fix, revert back to the old categories and wipe out all of our efforts, or the same bug appears in the new categories and they also go missing.

Never before in 25 years of business have I felt so tied into such an awful supplier as Microsoft.

Hi John,

Thank you so much for the update!

Hopefully they can fix this as quickly as possible, fingers crossed.

Confirmed issue with New Outlook and Webmail, Outlook Version 2406 (17726.20160) worked fine for me.

We have also had the same thing happen to one of our employees. I can see the category when I click on the contact but the lists that were once listed under categories are no longer there. Out of 20 we have 5 left. This is not in a shared list but used by one of our estimators when sending out bids.