WASHINGTON (TNND) — Google Calendar users have recently noticed default references for a handful of holidays and cultural events are no longer appearing on their desktop or mobile applications.
The update gained online attention after people mentioned upcoming events such as Pride and Black History Month were no longer being listed. But Google says it made the change midway through last year.
The tech giant told The Associated Press in a statement that “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,” the statement continued.
The Verge was one of the first to report on the changes.
Google recently gained attention for its decision to change the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali on Google Maps following President Donald Trump’s orders to rename the body of water to the Gulf of America and revert the title of America’s highest mountain peak to Mt. McKinley.
“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” Google previously explained. “When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America.”
Trump officially recognized Feb. 9, 2025, as the first “Gulf of America Day.”