Users of Google Calendar have complained that events like Indigenous Peoples’ Month, Black History Month, and Pride Month are no longer automatically shown. Holocaust Remembrance Day and Jewish Heritage Month are among the other holidays that have been eliminated.

Users have criticized the move, which was verified by a Google product specialist, as being politically driven. Others referred to the action as “shameful,” accusing Google of caving in to outside pressure.

But Google provided another reason. Last year, the business changed its calendar settings to exclusively show public observances and national holidays, according to spokeswoman Madison Cushman Veld. Why? According to Google, maintaining its prior holiday list was no longer feasible. Even though many users are disappointed about the change, they may still manually add these events to their calendars if they want to keep remembering them.

Here is Google’s explanation of the move, as provided by Madison Cushman Veld, a spokesperson:

We have been using timeanddate.com to display national holidays and public holidays in Google Calendar for more than ten years. The Calendar team began manually collecting a larger collection of cultural events in several nations worldwide a few years ago. We received comments that several nations and events were missing and that it wasn’t sustainable or scalable to manually manage hundreds of moments consistently around the globe. Therefore, in the middle of 2024, we went back to displaying just national holidays and public holidays from timeanddate.com worldwide, letting users manually add additional significant dates.