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newsd process on Big Sur downloading MASSIVE amounts of traffic

I was notified by my ISP that I was close to using my monthly allocated download limits in just the first few days of the month. Looking at my router's activity monitor I noticed that both my 2017 5K iMac and 2020 MacBook Air (M1) had significant amounts of unexplained network activity.

So I installed Little Snitch on both machines to monitor traffic and in just a couple days the newsd process on the iMac downloaded 375GB and the Mini downloaded 130GB.

And specifically the downloaded traffic occurred with hostnames apple.news and c.apple.news. Both have valid signed certificates by Apple according to Little Snitch.

Although I use the News app on my iPad I don't regularly use it on either Mac.

Has anybody else experienced this activity? I'm wondering if there is a bug in Big Sur or I possibly have some sort of malware masquerading as legitimate? A scan with Malwarebytes is clean on both machines.

Thanks in advance for for any suggestions.

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 11.2

Posted on Dec 22, 2020 9:41 AM

Top-ranking reply

Robert Olding

Level 1

62 points

Posted on Jan 10, 2021 10:40 AM

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.

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newsd process on Big Sur downloading MASSIVE amounts of traffic

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