Google Calendar users no longer see default entries for events like Pride, Black History Month

NEW YORK (AP) — Google’s online calendar has removed default references for a handful of holidays and cultural events — with users noticing that mentions of Pride and Black History Month, as well as other observances, no longer appear in their desktop and mobile applications.The omissions gained& attention online& over the last week, particularly around upcoming events that are no longer automatically listed. But Google says it made the change midway through last year.The California-based tech giant said it manually added “a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries” for several years, supplementing public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com that have been used to populate Google Calendar for over a decade. Still, the company added, it received feedback about some other missing events and countries.“Maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” Google said in a statement sent to The Associated Press. “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.”Google did not provide a full list of the cultural events it added prior to last year’s change — and therefore no longer appear by...