People are suffering from the age-old iCloud Calendar spam problem again

Calendar App On Iphone Hero
Calendar App On Iphone Hero (Image credit: Sergio Velasquez / iMore)

What you need to know

  • People have historically suffered from spam appointments appearing in their iCloud calendars and it's happening again.
  • Users can unsubscribe from these calendar subscriptions, but they need to know how.

Every so often we see a spate of people complaining about spam appointments appearing in their iCloud Calendars and it's super irritating when it happens to you. If you already make use of Calendar Family Sharing it adds even more to your calendar, but there is a way to fix it in the short term.

As 9to5Mac points out, people are taking to Twitter to share their frustration that this is still happening. I say still happening because I remember this starting more than five years ago and it still hasn't been fixed. That said, the issue is that people are accepting invitations to subscribe to calendars and even if they press Cancel the invitation will reappear later. And there is no way to block those invitations.

There's a growing thread on Reddit, too.

Anyone who finds themselves stuck with a subscribed calendar like this can remove it easily enough by tapping an event and then tapping Unsubscribe from this Calendar at the bottom of the screen. It isn't ideal, but it works. At least in the short term.

These calendar invitations normally appear on websites within Safari which means the best way to avoid them is to be careful what you accept. That's a good rule of thumb for life on the internet anyway, but hopefully Apple finds a way to make this problem go away for good in the future.

Apple's iCloud is one of the best iPhone calendaring options out there and it's free with every Apple device, so don't ditch it just yet. Just try and keep tabs on what you're tapping for now.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.