Google’s online calendar has removed default entries for a handful of holidays and cultural events, including Pride, Black History Month, and others, the California-based tech giant confirmed.
The omissions gained attention online over the past week, particularly around upcoming events that are no longer automatically listed.
Google said the change was made midway through last year, dispelling suspicions that the change was made as a result of President Donald Trump’s executive order to end government diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
As the company added more dates, more requests poured in to have additional special dates from countries all over the world listed as well.
“Maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” Google told 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 had accumulated over the years prior to scrapping them, but social media users pointed to several holidays and cultural observances in addition to Pride Month and Black History Month, such as Indigenous Peoples Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” Google said last month.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, a science division of the Department of the Interior, the GNIS is updated bi-monthly as changes and additions from federal, tribal, state, local, and nongovernmental data are continually processed.
Google confirmed Monday that the Gulf of America name has taken effect. Google Maps users in the United States now see the Gulf of America name, whereas users in Mexico will still see Gulf of Mexico. Users in all other countries see both names. Apple and Microsoft’s Bing have also renamed the gulf on their maps.
The change from Denali to Mt. McKinley has not yet been processed by the GNIS. For now, the mountain peak still appears as Denali on Google Maps.
America’s highest peak was named “Denali” in 2015 during President Barack Obama’s second term. Though the move aimed to recognize the traditional name used by indigenous people in the area, it was considered a politically controversial decision.
“Denali” translates to “The High One” in the Athabaskan language.
The 20,320-foot peak was named McKinley at the time of its discovery by William McKinley, a prospector exploring the central Alaskan mountains, who was the Republican presidential candidate at the time. McKinley would go on to win the election to become the 25th U.S. president, before Theodore Roosevelt.
