Some 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.
One of the biggest companies in the world can’t maintain a calendar. What a joke. Time to shift my sites from gcloud.
They’ve removed “Battle of the Boyne” day from the UK google calendar, despite it still being listed on timeanddate.com. It’s a bank holiday in Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK.
To be fair, in non-Northern-Ireland-UK, we didn’t really know what the Battle of the Boyne was, but I still resent google stealing it from us.
[Edit - For those Battle-of-the-Boyne fans out there, it’s the 12th July for the actual anniversary, and the 14th July 2025 for the holiday “day” this year.
Fair weather allies, aren’t.
Get rid of the 4th of July. It doesn’t mean anything.
I’ve been thinking it’s time to tear down the statue of Liberty too
Just return it to France.
You can try as hard as you want to erase it, but the people that it’s important to will never let you forget. Especially now.
I wonder how long before September 1 becomes “Liberation of Poland Day”.