Black History Month, Pride Month, public holidays no longer appear on Google Calendar
The start of Black History Month and Pride Month will no longer be recognized by Google Calendar, and now users will have to manually add observed commemorative months and public holidays themselves, the tech company said.
Google had previously manually added both months and some other public holidays and national observances on its Calendar app, but that will change going forward.
In a statement emailed to USA TODAY, a Google spokesperson said, "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," the statement continued. "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.'
According to timeanddate's website, the Stavanger, Norway-based company has 40 employees and contains more than 7,600 holidays in its database.
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Google Calendar users will have to manually add public holidays, national observances
Some of the other moments that will no longer appear are numerous "celebrations" on various topics around the world, such as Teachers Day, according to the Google spokesperson. Although Black History Month, Lunar New Year and other observed commemorative months won't be on Calendars, Google said they "actively celebrate and promote cultural moments as a company in our products."
The spokesperson also said public holidays and national observances are two categories shown on Google Calendar, and users can customize their settings within the app to either show, hide or unhide them.
Google changed 'Gulf of Mexico' to 'Gulf of America' on Maps app
This change in Google's Calendar app comes after the company recently changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America on its Maps app. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Jan. 20 to officially rename the Gulf of Mexico.
"I took this action in part because, as stated in that Order, '(t)he area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America," Trump said in a White House news release.
In a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter, Google said it has a "longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources." The company also said it abides by the U.S. Geological Survey's geographic updates, including changing the Alaskan mountain currently called Denali to "Mount McKinley."
According to Google's X post, official geographical names will vary between countries as Maps users will see their official local name while everyone in the rest of the world sees both names.
Contributing: Fernando Cervantes Jr./ USA TODAY
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