newsd process on Big Sur downloading MASSIVE amounts of traffic

I had the same problem on two Macs, a 2019 iMac and a late 2013 MacBook Pro. Both machines were downloading up to 90GB of data a day. I hit my data cap in 8 days. I talked to Apple Support and we looked at a number of things, and we kept coming back to the newsd process. So, on the iMac, I did a reinstall of Big Sur 11.1 and on the MacBook I turned off iCloud syncing for the News app in the System Preferences (iCloud Settings).

Turning off iCloud syncing for the News app is the thing that worked and stopped the bandwidth hogging.

I have the same problem, and have gone over my Xfinity data cap for the month. Typically, I use less that half of it. Fortunately I get a grace month. Once I started tracking it with Activity Monitor, the data usage was clearly due to newsd.

Manually stopping the newsd process with Activity Monitor doesn't help. Turning off iCloud news synching didn't work for me - did for a bit and but then the problem reoccurred. Reinstalling Big Sur didn't help. What did help was installing Lulu and specifically blocking newsd (and, for good measure, News and NewsToday2, although I doubt they are the problem).

I also dropped my Apple News+ account, partly because I realized there were perfectly good options elsewhere. However, it was Lulu that worked. Thanks to posters here for the suggestion.

It might be possible to accomplish the same thing with built-in MacOS firewall, by going to Security & Privacy, Firewall, Firewall Options, hitting the "plus" button and drilling down to System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/NewsDaemon.Framework/newsd, and then "Block incoming connections". Probably would need to uncheck "Automatically allow built-in software to receive incoming connections" as well. I did these things on top of the Lulu solution, just to see there was a way to do it, and they at least don't appear to screw my computer up, but I can't verify for sure if the MacOS firewall solution will work since I've got Lulu working on top of it.

Apple needs to get on this. Note that there are news outlets propagating the "turn off News iCloud syncing" solution. As this doesn't seem to work, hopefully they'll update their articles.

I started noticing this same exact issue around November/December of 2020 -- I've exceeded the typical Comcast Xfinity 1.2 TB limit every month since then. I am also an Apple News+ subscriber, so having to turn off iCloud Sync makes the subscription less useful, as my magazine subscriptions no longer propagate automagically across my devices.

One other significant issue I've noticed in this same time period is that having Apple News enabled in iCloud Sync ends up using *a lot* of storage on my iOS devices that can't be easily freed, as it falls into the "Other" category in "Settings/General/[iPhone, iPad] Storage". One of my iPads was within 300MB of its storage limit -- disabling iCloud Sync for Apple News freed up over 10 GB (!!!) of storage.

None of this was an issue prior to November/December of 2020. I believe Apple introduced a bug in Apple New for iOS during the 14.x cycle. I did manage to find the Apple News cache on my MacOS drive, which was 10GB+ in size, but I don't have time to look into what it is actually storing. I assumed Apple News used iCloud Sync to store a list of your subscriptions, as well as a list of your favorites -- which all should literally be simple URLs. However, it's clear that Apple News is using iCloud to store *a lot* of additional data.

I was having this problem on my MBP and iMac. The problem went away once I turned off the icloud News sync AND uninstalled Bitdefender, which I was also running on both machines. With the 11.2 update I did not have the problem happen again with newsd until I reinstalled Bitdefender and suddenly downloads went through the roof again. I uninstalled Bitdefender and it went away again. So it would appear that this could have some sort of tie-in with antivirus software. Bitdefender has been no help and said that the only fix was disabling icloud syncing... so no more Bitdefender in my future.

My work involves sharing files with clients and business partners on a regular basis, so I feel much more comfortable running antivirus software on my macs, and it has caught stuff on drives with files people needed to share. I'm not sure if the items it flagged were things that could have caused me any issues on a Mac, but glad that I never had to find out the hard way.

I’m in the same boat. I’ve used up almost all of the bandwidth my ISP allocates per month (1.25 TB) thanks to this issue with Apple News. Turning off iCloud sync for Apple News seems to have fixed it, but I’m still seeing some days where Apple News is using 3-4 Gb across my network. Better than 80+ Gb I was seeing previously, but it still seems excessive for a news app.

I still have 11 days left in my ISP billing cycle so I’m guessing I’ll end up going over my bandwidth limit, which is an extra $10 for every 50 Gb. I’m going to try to send my ISP an email to see if they’ll offer a free bandwidth limit increase for the month based on this issue but I highly doubt they’ll do anything.

What seems to have worked for me is installing the beta of macOS 11.2. Originally, turning off News in my iCloud settings helped, but it seems like I'm now able to use both iCloud News functionality and don't see the data usage I was seeing with 11.1. So far, no other problems running the beta, either (it actually seems to have fixed the random screensaver problem, too).

I believe I've managed to get it to stop. I'm not sure exactly what step I took that made the process stop, but it now behaves normally. I'll list what I did and hopefully it will help someone else.

1. Updated to macOS Big Sur 11.3. (After updating, I turned News back on in iCloud and checked the Activity Monitor. The "newsd" network process was still out of control downloading GB's of data very quickly.
2. I quit News
3. I turned News off in iCloud.
4. I opened News and cleared each of the items listed individually including the "Reset Identifier" under the "Clear History" menu from the "News" menu bar drop down. (See the attached screenshot.)
5. I unfollowed all the various publications I had initially followed when I first setup News+ back in November of 2020. (You'll find these under the "Following" section in the News sidebar. Just right click on each and choose "Unfollow Channel" from the pop up menu.)
6. I quit News, turned it back on in iCloud, then opened News, and followed whatever publications I wanted.

This worked for me!

The "newsd" process stop downloading massive amounts of data. I check the activity monitor every time I open News and it only downloads a few MB's of data per day.

Hope this helps some of you.

Cheers!

I am also having this issue. Got a letter from our ISP last month saying we were using an abnormal amount of data. We never go over our limit of 6TB. However, newsd was causing massive amounts of data downloads with our 3 Macs in our household. I have turned off News in iCloud and it seems to have stopped. It is pretty obvious when it started for us in the picture.

Update: I cannot delete the News app, which I tried to do. I unchecked NEWS on my iCloud backups, I deleted the entire News folder under Library, I ran CleanMyMac (which is what found the problem for me in the first place), and now I'm down to 175 Gig used, which is much more reasonable for a four-year-old computer.

I also unsubscribed to AppleOne, since that's when it started for me, too. I'm back to just family. I never used the others "benefits" of Apple One.

Computer is nice and cool and no fans running. Whew. I

I have noticed the same problem - in the end I used my firewall to block newsd from accessing the internet as, like you, i don't use News on the mac only on iOS devices. (I use LuLu not little snitch but it does the same job)

Ahhh. Little Snitch does that - you mentioned that earlier in one of your posts. Didn't know about that app until you mentioned it. Downloaded it, trialled it, loved it, it worked, bought family licence. Blocked newsd. Problem solved. Incidentally, the news app still works, but none of that silly data constantly downloading. Nice job mate. Wouldn't have gotten to this point without finding you and your helpful posts!

Had this problem for months. Just force quit it every time I restarted.

finally decided to take the medicine, took the plunge and planned to reinstall Mac OS X for the days fun.

but before that I just installed 4gb of updates to the latest version of OS X .

so far so good.

no newsd resurrecting itself.

no crawl.

fingers crossed.

recommend you try this first.

Reinstalling the system took a while but it's solved the problem (along with turning off news iCloud syncing).

Turning off iCloud syncing worked for me!