Google Calendar removed events like Pride and BHM because its holiday list wasn’t ‘sustainable’ – The Verge
Google says it switched to only showing default entries for public holidays and national observances last year.Google says it switched to only showing default entries for public holidays and national observances last year.by Jay PetersSome Google Calendar users are angrily calling the company out after noticing that certain events like Pride month are no longer highlighted by default. Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage have also been removed, according to a Google product expert.One user called the move “shameful” and said that the platform is being used to “capitulate to fascism.” Over the last few years, there have been comments and media reports complaining about the presence of the notes, but now they’re gone.Google confirmed it’s made changes to the default Calendar events, but with a different explanation about when and why. Here’s Google’s explanation of what’s going on, provided by spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld:For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar. Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world. We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable. So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.Timeanddate.com didn’t reply to requests for comment.A weekly newsletter by David Pierce designed to tell you everything you need to download, watch, read, listen to, and explore that fits in The Verge’s universe.© 2025 Vox Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved
Source: https://www.theverge.com/news/608858/google-calendar-missing-events-holidays
