Google Calendar is showing old times

You changed something in 1pm, a booking time, the time zone your feed publishes in, the start of an event, and Google Calendar is still showing the old version. You have waited hours. You have refreshed. Nothing moves. This article explains why that happens and the one reliable way to force Google to show the current data.

This is specific to Google Calendar. Outlook and Apple Calendar refresh on their own schedules and rarely get stuck the same way. If you are just impatient about a normal refresh delay, that is covered in syncing your bookings to Google, Outlook, or Apple Calendar. This article is for the case where Google seems to have frozen the feed entirely.

What is actually going on

When you subscribe to a calendar feed by URL, Google does not read that link fresh every time you open your calendar. It fetches the feed on its own timetable, stores a copy on Google's servers, and shows you the stored copy. That stored copy is a cache.

Most of the time the cache is fine, it just means changes take a few hours to appear. But Google's cache for a subscribed URL can hold on far longer than a few hours, and there is no button, on our side or yours, to tell Google to drop it and re-read. The link is correct. Open it in a browser and you will see the current bookings and the current times. Google is simply serving you its old saved copy of that same link and refusing to let go of it.

This shows up most often after a time zone change. You set or corrected your calendar feed's time zone in 1pm, every time in the feed shifts to match, but Google keeps drawing events at the old offset because it is reading its cached copy from before the change. The feed is right. The cache is stale.

The fix: give Google a link it has never seen

The trick is that Google's cache is tied to the exact link. It has no cache for a link it has never fetched. So instead of fighting the cache on the old link, you retire that link, generate a fresh one, and subscribe to the new one. Google has nothing saved for the new link, so it has no choice but to read it fresh.

The important part, and the thing most people try first that does not work: unsubscribing from the old link and re-adding the same link does not clear the cache. You would think removing the calendar and adding it back would force a fresh read, but Google recognises the URL and serves its saved copy again. The link itself has to change. That is why the fix below resets the link in 1pm first, rather than just re-adding the feed in Google.

Here is the full sequence. Do it in this order.

1. Reset the link in 1pm. Open the top right menu, choose Account, open the Calendar sync card, and click Reset link. This creates a brand new .ics link and immediately stops the old one from working. Copy the new link.
2. Remove the old feed from Google Calendar. On a computer, open Google Calendar. In the left sidebar under Other calendars, find the 1pm feed, hover over it, click the three dots, and choose Unsubscribe (or Settings then Unsubscribe). This clears out the old, stuck copy completely. Do not skip this step. Leaving the old feed in place leaves the stale copy on screen.
3. Add the new link. Still in Google Calendar, click the plus next to Other calendars, choose From URL, paste the new link, and click Add calendar.

That is it. The new link carries all the same bookings, so nothing is lost, you have simply moved Google onto a link it cannot serve from cache.

How to tell it worked

There is a satisfying little tell here. When you add the new link, Google has to actually go and fetch the feed for the first time, so the calendar takes a moment to populate, often a few seconds before your events appear. That pause is Google reading the live feed. It is the thing you want to see.

If you had instead re-added the old link, it would populate more or less instantly, because Google still had it cached and served the saved copy without going back to the source. Instant is the warning sign. The short wait is the good sign.

So: add the fresh link, watch it take a few seconds to fill in, and the times you see will be the current ones.

Why not just wait

You can wait, and eventually Google will re-fetch on its own. But "eventually" for a subscribed URL can be a long time, long enough that it is not a real answer when someone is looking at wrong times on a shared calendar today. Resetting the link and re-subscribing takes about a minute and works every time, which is why it is the recommended fix rather than the fallback.

One thing to know about resetting

Reset link replaces the link for everyone, not just for you. If you had shared the calendar link with a manager or a second device, each of those places is still pointing at the old, now-dead link and will stop updating. Send them the new link and have them re-subscribe the same way. This is the same behaviour described under Reset in the main calendar sync article, it is worth remembering when a whole team relies on the feed.

If it is not a caching problem

Before you reset, it is worth a ten-second sanity check that the feed itself is right. Paste the link straight into a browser's address bar and open it. It downloads a .ics file. Open that file in a text editor if you like, or just note that a fresh browser fetch bypasses Google entirely.

• If the browser copy shows the correct times, the feed is right and Google's cache is the problem, so the reset above is your fix.
• If the browser copy shows the wrong times too, the issue is in the booking or the feed's time zone, not the cache, and resetting the link will not help. Check the event's times in 1pm and, if the offset looks wrong for everyone, your calendar feed time zone. See time zones in 1pm for how times are stored and published.