Outlook : Meeting Cancelled as Organiser but remains for Attendees

I have another weird one today, where someone who organised a meeting and then made a modification then tried to cancel the meeting, however the meeting vanished from the organiser calendar but remained in the all the attendees calendar.

Weird, however being the only organiser other people could not cancel it, if you check in Outlook Web Access the meetings were also gone from there as well, they did appear in the Sent Items as cancelled meetings but the attendees still had the meeting.

This is known as a phantom meeting as the organiser cannot cancel it and the attendees can only remove it from their own calendar, so we need a little "out of the box" thinking here, all we have are the meetings in the attendees calendars, we can work with that.

In this example there were two meetings and we need both of them to fix this issue, so first from the Outlook where the attendee still has the meeting from that Attendee Outlook open the meeting then choose from the File menu the "Save as" option shown below:

We then need to save the meeting which is in an ICS format (which is the default) then from here we will save this on the Desktop and ensure we only save that "single" appointment as below:

You will need to do this for the other appointment as well, and at the end you should have 2 x ICS files on the desktop with the appointment names, as below:

Excellent, now we need to go back to the organiser Outlook and we need to get these ICS files to these Organisers desktop, which sounds more complex then it is - in a security setting!

NOTE : Please remember that ICS file are high risk so you cannot use teams or outlook to e-mail them, you may need to change the extension to .txt to copy them over, then once downloaded from Teams\Outlook change them back to .ics

Right now you have the files on the desktop on the Organisers from Outlook you need to choose File then Open & Export (yes are are importing) and you guess it we need Import/Export as below:

Then we need to choose "Import from ICS file" as below and click next:

Then we need to choose the first ICS file to import as below:

Then you will get the "security warning" its just Outlook being overprotective over a file you have created yourself, for this click Yes to continue.....

You will then be asked if you wish to open as new or import, please choose Import here.....

Then for this example we need to repeat for the seconds appointment (which is not shown here) then when you have done this you will have the appointments on the Organisers Outlook as you can see below:

If you notice that "Stubborn Meeting 2" has not been accepted which is not possible for the Organiser as they created it, more on this later, firstly we need to deal with the first meeting.

Find the meeting and right click on the Meeting then click cancel, which you did before but this time it is the actual meeting not a phantom meeting that you had an other did not have......

Then you will need to confirm you want to send the cancellation, and after a short delay the meeting will be removed from all the attendees calendars.

Now we are on to the other meeting, however this time when you right click this meeting you get no cancel option as below, (or if you do when you click the cancel button the meeting removes itself from your calendar not the attendees calendes)

This option will only allow you to remove it from your calendar which is back to square one, also note if you get the option to cancel and you choose it, you will need to reimport the ICS file again.

How do you remove this entry then????

Well the answer is not with Outlook, the answer is with Outlook Web Access or OWA, so to get there its https://outlook.office.com/mail - then once here navigate to your calendar click on the appointment and where Outlook did not give you the option the website does as you can see below:

Then when you click on "Cancel" you can then enter the reason and purge this appointment into a black hole:

You have now removed multiple appointments that were very stubborn and caused lots of unnecessary aggravation, damn those meetings, damn them to hell.