A vibe coded calendar integration crashed everyone's Outlook

Posted by prettyyboiii@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 8 comments

Today at work a developer announced a new integration between Microsoft 365's calendar and a separate system that we are piloting. He was very open about it being vibe coded, and even went as far as to say he had "done it against all advice" and credited Claude. After first receiving plenty of praise, a message ticked into the mail channel - "Did anyone else's Outlook just crash from X's mail?".

Whoops, turns out something went horribly wrong with the integration and an invite sent out to a mailing list causes every Outlook Classic instance to crash. Luckily I'm on new Outlook, but most people at my work are on Classic due to policy (which I found a sneaky way to circumvent, because screw Outlook Classic).

Mind you, the fix for this was to go into webmail and delete the invite before re-launching Outlook. Luckily this mailing list was only for semi-competent IT employees, but it still caused a lot of noise.

TL;DR: My job is safe for another decade.