Forum Discussion

Colin365's avatar
Colin365
Brass Contributor
Dec 12, 2023

What is happening with Microsoft Bookings? (Group Bookings disappearing and emails changing format)

I started noticing something strange happening with Microsoft Bookings yesterday morning. First it looked like the times were wrong because I was getting confirmation emails in a 12-hour format (instead of the usual 24-hour format). We normally have a time that can be booked at 16:30 but the emails were saying just 04:30 (no "a.m" or "p.m"). I started testing things from a customer point of view and every time I tried I was getting a different structure in the confirmation email than "normal". The sender information was missing, normally it has been the booking calendar name as the sender. It contained different wording for the "rebook" button. Some parts of some messages were in a different language. They included the day of the week and month in abbreviated format which makes it harder to read the information. If the customer did click on the rebook button then they would see the wrong appointment time (possibly linked to an old time-zone problem that previously existed?). All of these things are not consistent. The situation could change drastically within just a few minutes which makes me think that the program is being updated and something has gone wrong.

A couple of hours later I started seeing the name of a person who had cancelled their booking appear in the subject line of an email which has never happened before. Not for a group booking although I can imagine that this is the experience for 1:1 bookings, maybe? Today something similar happened with one person cancelling from a group booking but instead of just getting the cancellation email for the single person it was an event cancellation email and then it looked like the whole group appointment had been removed from the calendar (which could be confirmed in Outlook) and the information had disappeared from the export data function as well. Luckily I am not relying completely on the calendar function in Bookings and I had all the information backed up (I have also recently started using Power Automate to get the booking information because it can be hard to keep up with the number of changes that the customers make with their bookings). I figured that I needed to input all the data again because the appointment time is on this Friday and all the preparations have already been made. I was also lucky enough to meet one of the customers in person and they confirmed for me that they didn't receive any cancellation message so that means that appointment time just completely disappeared without notifying any of the customers! I guess I should be thankful for this otherwise it would cause a lot of confusion and a much bigger problem to try and fix before Friday.

I thought that the problem could have been linked to the cancellation because if I look in the Outlook calendar view I could see that the person's name is part of the service title but then within an hour or so I noticed that something similar happened again. Another group appointment time has completely disappeared from the calendar in Bookings, but this time the problem seems to be connected to someone making a new booking for that time slot. This time I can still see the name of one of the original customers in the Outlook appointment but all the old information for all the original customers has disappeared completely from Bookings. I guess there is no way to get this information back?

I am also seeing that the number of available slots that can be booked keeps changing. I increased the number spaces for a couple of dates but then these changes just seem to reset to the default number.

Another thing that has happened is that I can no longer access the customer view of Bookings when I am logged in on my admin account. The page just reloads about 10 times before giving a 500 error and ending up being redirected to https://outlook.office.com/. It works normally if I go in via an incognito browser window.

I don't understand what is happening with Microsoft Bookings. I can imagine that all of this is somehow an update that Microsoft has made which has caused all these bugs and this terrible experience but I think it is surprising that nobody else seems to be reporting any problems that can be linked to this at the moment. I haven't changed anything in the settings for bookings and the program has worked without any major problems for a very long time (I've handled more than 5700 bookings through this program so I have no plans to switch to a different booking program). I keep testing things by making fake bookings and as of now the confirmation emails seem to have reverted back to their old format from two days ago. I need to start opening dates for January which can be booked but I don't think I can trust this program to work properly at the moment. It would be nice to be able to get information about what changes being made and any possible bugs that exist in the program to help those of us who use this program every day.
microsoft bookings
problem

9 Replies

  • cheledimmett's avatar
    cheledimmett
    Copper Contributor
    May 07, 2024

    Colin365 All of my booking settings have disappeared and when I try to recreate them I get an error message that the meeting hours are not correct (even when trying to reassign staff.)  I have lost all access to this system now.  Weird!

  • cj_NASWA's avatar
    cj_NASWA
    Copper Contributor
    Mar 21, 2024
    I was missing the name as well but I changed the "look" back to classic under the business page information and the names returned
  • myliejames's avatar
    myliejames
    Copper Contributor
    Dec 13, 2023

    Colin365 We have also developed issues within this past week. A booking that occured for today on December 5 is correct. However, every single booking that was created this week is not displaying correct. The customer information is now showing up in the notes field.

    • Colin365's avatar
      Colin365
      Brass Contributor
      Dec 15, 2023

      Hello Babu_Alagarsamy, thanks for looking into our problems with Microsoft Bookings earlier this week. I was just wondering if there was any kind of update on the situation? I feel like something has happened because quite a few of the problems haven't been issues for us in the last day or so. But it would be nice to have some kind of confirmation from you about this because we're waiting to open the bookings for January and I would like to feel like we can continue to run our services as normal using Bookings.

      There have been a few more small oddities since my original post which could be worth noting here just in case anyone else is suffering any such problems, but I believe they are connected to the strange things we were experiencing rather than being new problems. For example, one of my own fake bookings was "updated" in the middle of the night which feels like it would be completely impossible unless it was in connection to something changing in the program. I got emails both as the user and admin for the change but couldn't see anything different in the data for that appointment time. Then we had one person show up for a booking today with a confirmation email but no record of the booking in the system but I think this was linked to when the whole group booking disappeared. At that time it was this customer's name in the subject of the cancellation email (which is not the normal experience for group bookings) but this obviously means that it wasn't this customer that was trying to cancel their appointment but someone else in the group.

      Hoping to get an update on the situation soon.

      • Babu_Alagarsamy's avatar
        Babu_Alagarsamy
        Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
        Dec 15, 2023

        Colin365 can you please DM the screenshots of the cancellations / update emails that you received? Are you able to reproduce this issue easily? 

Resources