Google has removed key cultural holidays, including Black History Month and LGBTQ+ Pride Month, from its calendar app.
The tech giant’s online and mobile calendar has for years marked the two celebrations on the first days of February and June respectively.
But for 2025, both months are blank.
References to Women’s History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage Month, Hispanic Heritage Month and Holocaust Remembrance Day have also been removed from this year.
Now the time-management service only shows default entries for public holidays and national observances, such as Christmas Day.
Users began flagging the change yesterday to the Google Calendar Help Community board, where product experts confirmed the removal.
The decision to no longer acknowledge Black, LGBTQ+ and women’s holidays didn’t exactly go down well with users.
One user, Grace Spence, said: “I understand that posting here will do absolutely nothing but I need to express just how sick and absolutely disgusting this company is for removing these holidays
“History will never be on your side.”
Another added: “I am disappointed that you have removed cultural events from your calendar. I always envisioned Google as a force for good in the world, and not racially or culturally biased. Poor show, Google.”
In response, Google product experts recommended users manually add the cultural holidays or send feedback through the Calendar app.
A Google spokesperson told The Verge that the company worked with TimeAndDate.com, a time-keeping website, to help add public holidays and national observances to the Calendar software.
They said: “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.”
The company has also confirmed that the changes to Google Calendar will not impact Google Doodles, redesigns of the company logo on the search engine’s home page that celebrates.
