Why are my profiles disconnecting from Cronofy?

There are multiple potential reasons behind disconnections between your calendar provider and Cronofy.

In the event of a calendar becoming disconnected, an email will be sent to the end user informing them that they must re-link their account. This happens when the token Cronofy holds for the account is no longer valid. This can be the case for a calendar profile (such as a Google account) or a conferencing profile (such as Zoom).

Behind the scenes, Cronofy is making requests to these other services using the tokens generated when you authorize Cronofy’s access to each service.

If the request fails, our error handling code will try and work out why.

Network connection failure #

If, for example, the network connection failed, then all we know is that something was wrong with the network, and Cronofy will retain the credentials and retry.

Invalid credentials #

If the server replies with something like a 403 Forbidden error, indicating the credentials are not valid for the request made, then it’s a clear sign that the credentials have been rejected. Cronofy will mark them as invalid and email the user to reconnect.

There are many reasons why this can happen - for example, Cronofy’s permissions may have been removed from your calendar, or an Admin may have chosen to revoke all previously issued tokens for that account. We are unable to determine detailed reasons behind tokens becoming invalid as we are only told that access has been denied once we try to use the token.

Mitigation steps #

It can be difficult to avoid these issues and often hard to determine a definite root cause. That being said, we would recommend the following:

1. Ensure that no policies are in place to change or remove Cronofy’s permissions on the tenant.
2. Make sure you do not have a mechanism in place that revokes previously issued OAuth tokens unless required.