newsd process on Big Sur downloading MASSIVE amounts of traffic

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 completely agree! I have a $50.00 overage fee from Xfinitity for this month. Exceeded the 1.2TB limit by 250GBs before I caught the problem. Prior to this month, I never exceeded 500GBs.

[Edited by Moderator]

Looks like the story is getting traction... 9to5 Mac broke the story yesterday.

“macOS Apple News bug causing huge background downloads, here’s how to fix it”

I am up to $70.00 in overage fees for the month.

I had the same problem and turning off the iCloud sync for News did NOT solve it.

Apple really need to take this as an urgent issue to be escalated and updated ASAP. I am getting 200GB a DAY coming from newsd process!

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.

Same problem here. Always used about 400-450 Gb / month with Xfinity. I haven't changed my daily data usage. Now I got a notice on the 20th last month that I was at 90% of my data cap. Crazy! I turned off iCloud syncing with News and force-quit the News app. Yet here I sit with Activity Monitor open and I'm watching the "data received" for newsd process slowly climbing. It was 6.89 Gb 10 minutes ago and now it's at 7.07 Gb. Then I simply opened without using the News app and watched it jump to 7.16 Gb. I've force-quit News app and Gb received is still increasing. What is going on and how do I stop it? And the irony is, I love the News app and pay for it.

Totally not a long-term solution, and I’m not even sure it works for everyone, but for me, on both computers that were affected, Leaving the news app opened eventually stopped the traffic.

Beyond that, you can use little snitch, but the free license only keeps the block active for I think one hour.

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've turned off iCloud syncing for News and I quit the News app when I'm finished reading it. My iMac has been up for two days now and Activity Monitor reports 45 Kb received by newsd. I don't know what to make of that. On the other hand, total data received in the last two days is 12.05 Gb. Seems very hard to believe. I don't do much other than read websites, send and receive emails, listen to some music (an hour a day), no video streaming, and so that seems like a lot. (I'm on macOS 11.2.1.)

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.

Already disabled news syncing on my 2020 iMac but makes zero difference. Suddenly see my whole home internet going to a crawl, and see the newsd process is swallowing Gigabytes without any purpose. Really sucks because I'm on super expensive ($70/month) 1990s AT&T DSL - 6mbit/s with 150GB cap per month.

this bug has already cost me a few hundred $ in overages as AT&T gleefully rapes me for $10 every 50GB overage. Frickin pathetic excuse for a business.

You’re implying that the deaf blind and dumb psychopathic behemoth of corporate Apple is giving a **** about our trivial little issues buddy. Hahahah.

im still dutifully “force quitting” the process every time I log in. No other way.

next well all have to go back to terminal server to reprogram their ****** work.

I just noticed it today when my computer said all 250 gig was full, and my computer has been running hot for a while. Same issue: Newsd folder

I turned off the sync and now I'm going to delete the blasted thing if I can!

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