If Your Google Calendar Events Just Disappeared On Your Mac, Try These Temporary Fixes

That’s what I get for not touching my Mac in a day or so. Thanks to a tip from Lifehacker reader David (no relation), we can now confirm that Mac users are probably having one heck of a time trying to manage their schedules today. If you synchronise your Google Calendar to your Mac calendar, all of your events might have just disappeared.

Thankfully, there is a temporary fix to restore your events, but it’s cumbersome.

A number of Mac users have reached out to Google to complain about the problem — rightfully so — and I can confirm that I just experienced it myself on a MacBook Pro running macOS Catalina.

I pulled up the normal Calendar app, saw all my events as they normally appear, and then watched every single Google Calendar-synchronised event disappear. Penn and Teller would be proud of this trick, but my blissfully blank calendar means I can’t use my Mac to figure out where I’m supposed to be (or when).

The two temporary fixes (so far)

The first fix that worked to get my Google events back on my Mac calendar is to go into Google Calendar directly and edit an event.

You have to make some kind of change to the event, even if it’s just adding a character to the title or description. Save it, refresh your Calendar on Mac (Command + R), and your event should pop back up. Repeat as needed until Google fixes this issue — which should happen soon, I hope.

If you want to re-add a calendar you control the rights to, pull up Google Calendar’s settings, click on your calendar, make sure “Make available to public” is checked, and copy the “Public address in iCal format” link.

Then, open up Calendar on your Mac, click on File, click on “New Calendar Subscription”, and paste the .ICS URL into that.

Once Google addresses the synchronisation issue, you can then delete this temporary calendar subscription (or else you’ll have two copies of every event on that calendar in your Mac Calendar app, which will get annoying).

I haven’t found a great fix to re-add all the events on calendars others have shared with you, but I’ll report back if I stumble across a method to restore these events. At the very least, this issue only affects your Mac and not your iPhone or iPad too, so you can still view all your events on your other Apple devices.