ios 17 Calendar Issue - Outlook

My company has been tracking this issue since iOS 17 was released. We've had a few bad ones involving all company Town Hall type invites being sent out. A lot of pressure from up high on how to block these due to concerns over brand and reputation.

We've determined that every invite generated with this issue:

1. Has a blank body (ie: Notes field).
2. Has a date which is always the current day rather than out in the future. (This helps with knowing which moderated messages to approve, keep reading)

After some research I came up with a Transport Rule in O365 to moderate these messages. It comes with a small catch that whomever you choose to moderate the messages will get hit with a bunch of false positives. You can tell it's a false positive if the meeting date is in the future versus that day. Seems a good number of people create calendar invites from their mobile devices with just a title and nothing in the Notes field. However, this transport rule was tested to fire only for mobile invites and not OWA or Outlook.

Rule description

Apply this rule if

Is message type 'Calendaring'

and Includes these patterns in the message subject or body: '^$'

and Is received from 'Inside the organization'

Do the following

Forward the message for approval to (add your own moderation group)

Except if

Includes these words in the message subject: 'Canceled' or 'Declined' or 'Tentative' or 'Accepted'

And it was in their release notes for 17.0.3 sooo

Greetings Hannous1,

Great job on isolating the behavior to iOS 17. You've completed some great troubleshooting steps. At this time, we suggest that you contact Apple Support directly concerning this issue with Calendar. They will be able to look further into this with you. Depending on your region, you might be able to contact them here: Get Support

Thanks for posting in Apple Support Communities.

We hope you have a wonderful day!

Hello. I had the same issue and I could not decline the invitations on my calendar. I finally found the solution and got rid of them! If you go into your mail app and go to junk folder, delete all your junk folder emails. This will get rid of the invitations on your calendar! let me know if this helped.

Hello. I had the same issue and I could not decline the invitations on my calendar. I finally found the solution and got rid of them! If you go into your mail app and go to junk folder, delete all your junk folder emails. This will get rid of the invitations on your calendar! let me know if this helped.

Great investigation. I have the same issue since updating to ios17. Posted a bug report to Apple today, and have found another thread here describing the same issue. Hopefully patched quickly.

the I am on IoS 17.0.3. I do not see “Edit” option for event invitations sent from Google calendar. As I said, I do not have an option to delete this invitation. The only options that are provided are “Accept”, “Maybe” or “Decline”. I declined the invitation, and it is showed as such, but it is still in the Calendar. I would like to completely remove it from the Calendar, but there is no such an option. However, the events I created (not the ones sent to me), are fully manageable and I can modify or delete them without any problem.

I just spent nearly 2 hours with Apple support. This is a Microsoft issue, not Apple. This is what the referred me to: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/outlook-ghost-invite-cancellation-notices/c4396529-ab84-48e0-94b1-dd877aa05f16

me too, tested iOS 17.1 no issue

Appreciate you connecting me to these other threads. I confirmed now that our issue is also 17.0.2 related.

Unfortunately it’s our CEOs phone and I can’t easily troubleshoot.

issue does not happen with every meeting but we were able to replicate it in real time.

Do you mind pointing me toward other threads? Hoping to gather more intel to share with my company's IT. Has happened to me twice, including with 17.0.3, so it hasn't been fixed yet. (For me, it's been with in-company invitations, not in junk mail, but otherwise, identical.)

(Such a bummer--very disruptive and inappropriate to be spamming hundreds of people with an invite to a meeting I don't own, proposed for 9pm or whatever time I happen to Decline the original invite!)

Thanks.