Outlook internet calendar not updating: why, and what to do

Updated 14 October 2026

You added a calendar to Outlook from a link — an .ics, iCal or webcal:// address from work, a school, a club or a booking system — and the events are out of date, or stopped changing weeks ago. Here is why that happens and what you can do about it.

Why it lags

A subscribed calendar is not a live connection. Outlook fetches the link on its own timetable, and that timetable is Microsoft's, not yours. Microsoft's own help says a subscribed calendar refreshes about every three hours and that the update "can take more than 24 hours". There is no refresh button for a subscribed calendar in Outlook.com or the new Outlook, so a shift that moved this morning can still be showing in its old place tonight.

Worse, a subscription can stop refreshing altogether and say nothing. The calendar still looks normal; it is simply showing an old copy.

Things worth checking first

• Open the link in a browser. If it downloads a file or shows text beginning BEGIN:VCALENDAR, the feed itself is alive. If it asks you to sign in, see the next section.
• Subscribe, do not import. In Outlook.com or the new Outlook use Add calendar → Subscribe from web. Upload from file is a one-time copy that never updates.
• Remove the subscription and add it again. This forces a fresh fetch, and is the only "refresh" the web versions offer.
• In classic Outlook for Windows, press Send/Receive (F9). Then look in File → Account Settings → Internet Calendars: the Update Limit tick box lets the publisher slow your updates down, and can be cleared.
• Try https:// in place of webcal://, or the other way round. They are the same feed; some versions of Outlook accept only one.

When the built-in subscription cannot do the job

If a few hours' delay is fine and the link is public, the built-in subscription is free and you do not need anything else.

What PortalCal does instead

PortalCal is a small app for Windows and Mac that does the fetching itself. It reads your calendar feed every five minutes — signing in with the feed's username and password if it has them — and writes the events into a calendar of its own inside your Outlook or Google account, so they appear on your phone and everywhere else that account goes.

• Every five minutes, and only what changed is rewritten.
• It tells you when it stops. A warning in the app, a notification, and a reminder in the calendar itself if syncing has been failing.
• Your history is kept. Events the feed has dropped stay in the calendar and in a file on your computer you can export at any time.
• Your feed password stays on your computer, encrypted. Nothing is stored on a server.