Q: Outlook says iCloud calendars are invalid

Has something changed on the iCloud service? We use the iCloud calendar service to share calendars as internet calendars via MS Outlook in the office with each other (out of office, delivery schedules, etc). It used to work fine up until NOV 12/2014, after which all Outlook users started having Outlook crashes upon startup. It doesn't seem to be restricted to our office either, since the Microsoft forums have been afire with the same issue.

We discovered that the crashing was due to the calendars being shared - as soon as we turned off calendar sharing in those people affected, the crashes stopped.

Only users sharing the iCloud calendars have been affected.

I originally thought it may be related to the MS updates that came out NOV 11 - BUT I have setup a test machine here, with Windows 7 and Outlook 2010 Pro, that has had no updates applied to it since April of this year, meaning none of the latest MS updates would be the issue. When I send the invitation to share certain calendars from iCloud to the test machine, and click the link, it crashes Outlook stating that the calendar is not a valid internet calendar file (after trying to communicate with the iCloud server). One computer even went as far as stating something about a specific line in the calendar code being improper, but crashed before I could ever get it written down.

Anyone using these calendars on iPhones etc seem ok - just iCloud calendars on Outlook is affected, which is 99.999% of the office.

I have run through the troubleshooting steps on a number of machines, including the test machine and none has fixed the issue.

We need help here, otherwise iCloud is pretty much a waste for 50-some office users, since the calendars is primarily what they all use it for.

Any and all suggestions is greatly appreciated.

Here is an example of the link that the invitation sends out for the Calendar subscription (altered of course) just in case it looks improper, but pretty sure it looks the same as always

webcal://p11-calendarws.icloud.com/ca/subscribe/1/G8XL8tmAFcctL9VXeAB4-6ijEkSjYh rPJ4s_1hN1FmELShLNk-uqoDdcb3Pmkmosrd0rVHHnfDgesUxrCYbehr-*********

The only explanation, after years of using it successfully, is that something changed in the iCloud structure or programming that has now affected MS Outlook users.