Excessive data usage from c.apple.news
I just recognized earlier today that there's an excessive amount of data usage coming from my iMac to the domain c.apple.news. Based on the domain name, I'm assuming that's coming from the News app on macOS Big Sur which consumed 72.17 GB yesterday and I'm currently sitting at 29.01 GB today. We have two accounts on our iMac, one for myself and another for my wife. I believe it's coming from my wife's account after digging into some of our router/firewall logs.
She mentioned yesterday she accidentally clicked the News app but closed it afterwards, but it seems like ever since then is when the excessive data usage started. Upon viewing the Activity Monitor app, I did notice her account had a service running that my account wasn't with a name along the lines of ...News2 (I forgot the exact name). I believe it was a service for the Apple News widget which her account has, but mine does not. We removed the widget and restarted the computer. I'm continuing to keep an eye on the bandwidth usage to c.apple.news and it appears to have stopped increasing, so I'm guessing that was the issue. Unfortunately I have an ISP that with a monthly bandwidth limit (thanks Cox), so this excessive bandwidth used isn't ideal.
Has anyone noticed similar behavior? I'm wondering if there's perhaps a bug with macOS Big Sur using multiple accounts and the Apple News widget.
Edit: Upon digging further into my firewall logs, it looks like this started well before yesterday:
- 29 Dec: 79 GB
- 30 Dec: 124.2 GB
- 4 Jan: 29.67 GB
- 5 Jan: 39.44 GB
- 7 Jan: 31.4 GB
- 8 Jan: 114.49 GB
- 9 Jan: 89.82 GB
- 13 Jan: 88.51 GB
- 14 Jan: 29.08 GB