• by Danielle Oster , February 12, 2025

Feb. 1 marked the beginning of Black History Month, but not on Google Calendar.

Google is facing criticism from Google Calendar users online over its decision to remove cultural events from the service, including Pride Month, Indigenous People’s Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day. The company claims it made the changes some months ago.

“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,” a Google spokesperson told Marketing Daily. “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.”

Commenters online have instead interpreted the changes as capitulation to the Trump administration’s attacks on “DEI” and “DEIA” (diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility).

Google’s recent actions may have set the stage for the Calendar blowback. Last week, Google told employees that it was ending equitable hiring initiatives promoting workplace diversity, complying in advance with an executive order that revokes landmark equal employment opportunity Civil RIghts protections, citing its status as a federal contractor.

Google claims the company will continue to celebrate and promote cultural moments in its products, and it published a post celebrating Black History Month to its blog, “The Keyword.” The company did not respond to follow-up questions about whether this will include Pride Month for June, and if it intends to make any changes to how it marks the holiday compared to prior years.