Google’s online and mobile calendars are no longer including references to Black History Month, Women’s History Month and LGBTQ+ holidays, among other events.
The world’s biggest search engine previously marked the beginning of Black History Month in February and Pride Month in June, but the events do not appear for 2025.
The removal of the holidays was first reported by the Verge last week.
A Google spokesperson, Madison Cushman Veld, provided the Guardian with a statement that said the listed holidays were not “sustainable” for their model.
“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,” the statement said.
“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 decision to no longer acknowledge Black, LGBTQ+ and women’s holidays is another move on the growing list of changes that Google has made following the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
The tech behemoth recently announced that it would be rolling back its previous commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in its employment policies following the US president’s orders to curb DEI in federal agencies in one of his first moves as president.
Google also revealed in late January that users in the US would see the name of the Gulf of Mexico changed to the “Gulf of America” and that the company would start using the name “Mount McKinley” for the mountain in Alaska currently called Denali after executive orders from Trump signed during his first day in office. The company enacted the Gulf name change for US users on Monday.
Many users on social media have expressed disappointment and frustration with Google’s latest decision. Following the changes, users who wish to track events such as Pride Month, Black History Month and Indigenous Peoples’ Month must now manually add them to their calendars.
It is not clear whether these changes will affect the Google Doodles, which usually celebrate these events with digital artwork on the website’s homepage. Google did not directly address the state of Doodles when asked by the Guardian, though it said: “Google continues to actively celebrate and promote cultural moments as a company in our products,” such as YouTube Music still offering a Black History Month playlist.
