Forum Discussion
Planner broken, or unusable?
Since late last week, Planner has become increasingly unusable. Buckets are being dragged out of position when right-clicking in an empty space to scroll left or right. Today, performance has deteriorated even further—opening a card now takes around 30 seconds or more, and adding comments is nearly impossible due to severe lag. This issue is affecting everyone in our organisation.
Does anyone know if Microsoft is actively working on a fix for these problems?
11 Replies
Honestly, it’s a bit of both. With Project being sunset and Planner’s rollout feeling a bit rough, it’s been challenging. I’ve used both tools for years, and it’s surprising how Planner has actually lost some ground over time. I really wish they had kept Project for the Web—it had so much potential! 😱
Planner is still missing a lot of basic functionality, and I’ve been encouraging our team to adopt it. Now I’m feeling a little awkward about that push.
*Written by Copilot. ☝️
My unsolicited opinion is that Microsoft laid off everyone on the rest of their products, took all the remaining resources and put them on Copilot; hoping it would fix the rest of their problems. That hasn't panned out yet ... but hey...Copilot can do this...sort of.
We have experienced issues as well. New entries not saved, new entries by others are not visible. The affected users change daily.
Yes, this is a known issue with Planner performance lately. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem and is rolling out fixes—best option is to monitor the Microsoft 365 Service Health Dashboard for updates.
So buggy, it is unusable. My Project for the Web plan was converted to Planner this month (August 25) and it is constantly locking up, refreshing but never presenting data, making fields read only, tasks disappearing, now allowing one to add a task, etc. I've tried to create a new plan but it behaves the same. It's a shame Microsoft has releases something so unstable it forces one to use other products just to keep a projects rolling.
Also experiencing major responsiveness issues. Locking up while trying to do simple things like add a comment. Have a plan we have used for 2 years that is unusable right now. Entire organization impacted.
Planner had s been having issues the past month.
First was the missing user profile pics about a month ago that has since been resolved, but with no official records or acknowledgement from Microsoft.
The last few weeks, we've been experiencing lag when typing any comments into Planner tasks. Sometimes the lag made what a user typed appear after about 5 secs, but sometimes the whole task screen just freezes indefinitely. The lag appears one day, then disappear the next. It's back again today with one user, and there are no report of this problem in the Admin console.
This problem occurs across all browsers on Windows 10 and 11, so we suspect it's a network issue over at Microsoft.This is quite concerning. We are currently evaluating Planner for our department.
Quick update on my issue.
I had a call with a MS support engineer.
- We opened Chrome Dev tools (F12) which allowed him to see a number of errors triggered when I tried to access Planner
- This generated a .har file (a log of these errors)
- He then researched the issue and discovered that it was a known issue
- It turns out that my mailbox was a shared mailbox, and this caused the issues I was having
I was pretty sceptical re. the shared mailbox being the root cause (I think this had been in place for some time, the issue only presented recently), however converting my mailbox back from shared resolved the issue.
I'm sure that there may be other root causes for other issues, but my recommendation would be to go into dev tools and see how errors are presenting - could help diagnose the issue.
The thing that is heavy in my mind, is the seemingly realistic possibility MS will decide to remove or change a feature without any notice. Or remove it regardless of some that may rely upon it. Projects are hard enough as it is, and the thought of having your key tool handicapped or completely broken mid project is terrifying.
The whole web based cloud architecture has benefits, but also downsides. As a serious user running serious projects, we need the contract with MS to include the option to keep the Planner version that is working for us, and not be forced to accept less features or new features we don't want. That was the great thing about software installed on your workstation, it was stable and stayed the same, we the customer had the power to choose to upgrade and when to upgrade.
I am also having issues with navitaging the planner screen. The vertical scroll bar at the bottom of the page frequently dissappears or doesn't respond correctly and instead moves the buckets out of position.
Upon opening for the first time each day, it's also started to begin adding a new task as if i had clicked the add task button which is very annyoying to have to keep clearing off.
I am using Planner directly and not via Teams etc.
I'm having significant issues too - starting since Friday / the weekend. For me, I can't add new tasks to a plan, I can't edit a task, assign it, etc.
Sometimes a plan will not display at all. Other times it will, but with partial information.
My issues persist regardless of accessing directly, via Teams, via Teams desktop, via Teams on web. The only way it appears to be working normally is via Teams iOS app.
However, it appears to be working fine for other users in our org (using the channels that are failing for me). Is it possible that they are accessing a different release of Planner than I am?
