domainwidedelegation.comStart free

Use cases → Scheduling

Cancel events across many calendars at once

Bulk-cancel meetings for multiple users after a team change, departure or incident, using domain-wide delegation.

Who it is forIT and operations teams cleaning up orphaned or obsolete events.
APIsCalendar API, Admin SDK
Typical scopescalendar, admin.directory.user

The problem

When a team is restructured or an organiser leaves, events linger on calendars and continue to send reminders or block time. Manual cleanup is error-prone and slow, especially when hundreds of users are involved.

How it works

  1. Enumerate affected users with the Admin SDK.
  2. For each user, impersonate their account and list upcoming events using the Calendar API.
  3. Filter target events by organiser, title, or time window.
  4. Call the events.delete or events.cancel endpoint for each match, handling recurring events specially.
  5. Log each operation and retry failures with exponential backoff.

What changes

Obsolete meetings are removed from all calendars, freeing up time and stopping unwanted notifications for everyone involved.

The trap in this one. If you cancel a recurring event series using events.delete, it only removes the series from the owner's calendar, not from invitees' calendars—guests keep phantom meetings. Use events.cancel and verify that status changes propagate to all guests. Failing to distinguish between single and recurring events leads to incomplete cancellation, leaving residue on participants' calendars.

Questions people ask

Do I need to notify users before cancelling?

The Calendar API can send notifications to affected guests, but you must explicitly set sendUpdates to 'all' when cancelling. Otherwise, guests will not be notified.

What about events organised by external users?

You cannot cancel meetings you do not own. For externally organised events, you can only remove the affected user as an attendee.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

Related use cases

Provision calendar events based on group membership

Create or update events for all members of a Google Group by impersonating users with a service account.

Set up team-wide calendar blockers from a service account

Block calendar slots for entire teams using delegated automation, ensuring no one books over key periods or events.

Inject events into user calendars at scale

Create or update calendar events across all users in a domain using a delegated service account, without requiring user interaction.