Google Calendar Outages

Because this is a calendaring blog and we should be keeping track of stuff like this:

Google Calendar Dies One Hour After Google Tweets About How Great It Is [Update]

The most interesting thing in this article was the  link to the G Suite status dashboard which, frankly, I have difficulty finding off the main G Suite "Give us your money NOW" site.

Make Google Calendar Stop Automatically Adding Events

From today's New York Times a good question and answer:

How do I make Google Calendar stop automatically adding events mentioned in Gmail?

Certainly it is possible but heed this warning: "Google warns that doing so removes all the past events added from Gmail."

This is totally bush-league!

Google should be ashamed they foisted that kind of slipshod capability on the public.

More Weirdness in an Over-Loaded Google Calendar

While experimenting to see if I could delete calendar items from a calendar and thereby finally clear an over-loaded test account I got this message:

 "Oops"?  Cute.  Too bad I do not know any serious corporations that ask for cute.

The goal was to see if deleting items would get me below a threshold, or if the threshold was irreversible.

The weird thing is that once I got that message, previously-deleted objects began re-populating the calendar.  Calendar zombies had risen from the grave!

Clearly there's a cache of the deleted items.  I have no information on when, how often, or if it gets cleared in a single session.

There is also some interesting behavior with old items.  To see this, load 10-15 years worth of calendar data and then travel back to some month in the year 2000.  The following unobtrusive message will display while the data renders (and it seems to take a while):

So there's either some background mechanism shunting historical data into slower, longer-term storage, or the system is not really optimized for rendering arbitrary stretches of time.

Added on September 6, 2011:
A variation of the above: cannot load your data -- come back when it's more convenient for Google....

Unable to Delete All Data in a Google Calendar

So let's say you're testing your calendar insertion (a prudent step which we not only endorse but require).  You either have a large calendar or run several insertions to put in over 40,000 items.  I suspect the problem starts with 32K objects, just because we are so suspiciously close to a magic binary number.
You go into your settings with the hope of deleting all data from your test account (and please make sure it is a test account):

You select Delete giving you this dialog box:

Where you promise you REALLY REALLY DO want to Delete all events, and click the Delete all events button.

Less than 60 seconds later you see the following dialog box and all your data is still in the calendar.

We do not seem to be alone.  We posted this on Google Calendar's Help Forum (whose only value has been confirmation from another user with the same problem). None of our current clients are going to hit this limit unless they do multiple insertions without practicing calendar hygiene.  

So practice calendar hygiene.

But we do want to get this out as a warning to everyone.

Addition on March 3, 2015: This post is now hugely popular.  So if there are folk out there who want to take an entire Exchange server of calendar data (we're talking an enterprise here) into Google calendar, and keep all the meetings live, let us know.  We've done Exchange to Exchange that way but will only add the Exchange to Google capability if we have a real customer.