Mac Calendar "Server responded with an error" message

Okay here's how I fixed it, this assumes you have no On Your Mac calendars, so back those up ahead. Also backup any Mail account settings like extra email address aliases. Try this at your own risk.

1. Close calendar
2. Go to activity monitor and end the process CalendarAgent
3. Delete your Google account in System Preferences
4. Go to your Google account and revoke MacOS permissions from your 3rd party app access. https://myaccount.google.com/permissions
5. Go to ~/Library and outright delete the Calendars folder
6. In ~/Library/Preferences delete com.apple.iCal.plist
7. Reboot your machine for good measure
8. On reboot re-add your Google account
9. Start-up Mail, Contacts, and Notes to get the resync started.
10. Calendar should startup like it's a fresh install but will sync.
11. I then used Caffeine to keep my Mac awake and left it to sync my massive Mail/Contacts/Calendar overnight (it was late but I had no errors so I figured it would take time).

After doing this, everything worked.

1. There seems to be mounting evidence that this is a server-side issue at Apple and/or Google. I presume one of them applied a configuration tweak (authentication procedure, SSL certs, etc.) that the other is not aware of.
2. This issue affects multiple generations of OS X: 10.14, 10.15, 11.
3. The "master thread" for the same issue at the Google forums side is at: https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/98473879?hl=en
4. Google Calendar Platinum Product Expert Neil@GCalToolkit wrote today: "I have confirmation that the Dev team are looking into this."
5. I'm a sysadmin and we pay for Google Workspace, so I was able to chat with a human at Google about this, a "Calendar specialist" at the Google Workspace support team. After describing the steps I took, he didn't even try to have me go through any troubleshooting steps. I can't add much, except: "Indeed, I have received cases since around 2 weeks ago about this same issue. I found our engineering team has already investigated the technical issue. However they found limitations when trying to troubleshoot this because of the CalDAV protocol limitations when it comes to third party apps."
6. The more "noise" we users make about this in a concentrated way, the higher the chance it'd make its way to the handful of individuals among the two companies' 282,000 employees, and be analyzed and resolved. If you are a developer (especially a caldav coder) or have Apple Enterprise support, please use your channels since you can get further ahead than we can with tier1 consumer Apple support.
7. Lastly, I do suspect fault lies about 60% with Apple, 40% with Google - because I just installed BusyCal, added my Google Account, and it immediately worked like a charm - while Calendar.app is borked. This is the only workaround I have to offer.

I have 2 Google accounts, one is a Google Apps and one is a personal one. The Google Apps is more important. I was able to fix it by going to Preferences, Accounts tab, and unchecking the Enable this account. Then wait for the calendar to disappear, then recheck the box. You might get the error, then do Try Again, and repeat this process 2 or 3 times. The problem went away!

This only worked on the Google Apps account; my personal Gmail account calendar still will not work.

Update on reproducing this problem - I can make accounts work/not work at will. It turns out the *last* account you enable will work, and all other Google calendars will stop working. So go to Preferences, Accounts tab and uncheck the Enable this account tab on each Google calendar. Then go back to each "less important" calendar and check them. They will start working and sync again. After they sync, go to the next most important one and check that one. It will sync. Finally do your work one and check that one. It will sync - at this point all the other ones will have errors. You'll have to live with that unfortunately until Apple fixes this problem. But at least it is possible to pick one calendar and get it to work.

SUCCESS. Had to tell Google access was okay. Deleted Google Calendar (and library calendar caches for old time sake). Reinstalled Google Calendar acct. Then went to email from Google saying account access granted. On that email is a button to verify it was me what did ir; and a button that said it wasn't me. . Click Yes it was ma access being granted.e and GoogleCalendar showed on macbook pro.

Google needed an affirmative response to emai about calendar.

Points to security change on Google's side. Apple may not be at fault here.

So far mine has been working flawlessly since last night just by selecting calendar from the top menu bar with the calendar open, then choose preferences, and Temporarily Uncheck Enable Account on the google account, then Recheck the box and it should reconnect. I closed the calendar completely and reopened it and still have not had the issue since.

UPDATE

I had to take the nuclear option. I followed the instructions from here for the steps described above (https://www.wikihow.com/Clear-the-iCal-Cache)

They are from 2018 when apparently this problem happened too. It tool less than 3 minutes.

Now my Calendar shows a "Google" calendar but it's not yet populated. I am guessing it will take all night to go over all Contacts and Events in the one account (School) that I added.

One think that I just noticed is that there is now a new (to me) calendar called "Siri Suggestions" that I don't remember being there before I cleared the cache, force quit the app, then restarted the computer. Just mentioning in case someone notices the same thing.

At the moment, the triangle in the upper left corner of Calendar is gone. It is currently 12:40PM [EST].

The same thing happened yesterday, and once nighttime comes around, the error reappears.

It doesn't seem to be an issue because of the macOS version since many of us are having the same issue with a different macOS.

Also, as stated before, peculiar how for some of us the error is gone in the morning to afternoon hours, yet reappears in the evening to nighttime hours. Apple and/or Google must have changed something on their end that has broken the sync.

Writing here won't really resolve our issue. We all must call Apple Support so there is an official bug report. Once they are informed by hundreds/thousands of us, they will probably take action. Posting and venting here will not resolve it.

And, as to contacting Google (only within a forum and probably a generic troubleshooting reply), I'm sure the reply will be that they aren't responsible for Apple software being incompatible with their services. Of course, it could be Apple's response as well. Hopefully not.

This has been an ongoing problem with Apple's calendar app. If you do enough searching, you'll find several "solutions", like:

Clearing the calendar cache.

Removing and re-installing the calendar account

Revoking and re-granting Google permissions

etc.....

In my experience, none of these is a particularly reliable solution. Bear in mind that this is an Apple problem, and not a Google problem. How do I know? I downloaded One Calendar from the app store (free download), and haven't had a problem since. It's been rock-solid, unlike Apple's turd-of-an-app.

Mine went bad again last night (around 9:00 PM PST). However, while in Calendar, going to Preferences/Accounts, and un-checking Enable Account; then re-checking it, solved problem. I've been good for 36 hours or so now, by just doing that a couple of times.

Again, for Apple team members who may be on this discussion group, we expect more from you. There is a reason that we all didn't buy Dell computers, and it has to do with more than hardware.

Howdy,

Please also see and post on Google support forum thread:

https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/98473879?hl=en#

I have yet to hear back from Google WorkSpace support's escalation regarding this issue.

--

FYI: I was first alerted to this issue with macOS Apple Calendar application error messages, and indeed, seeing the same error messages :

"Access to account “Google” is not permitted.

The server responded

“403”

to operation CalDAVAccountRefreshQueueableOperation.

"

As I'm also an IT Consultant, with a paid for Google WorkSpace account, with support, I've registered this as a trouble ticket, and hope to have it escalated for resolution.

FYI: I was also able to reproduce this myself, directly, on 2 computers, with 2 different macOS versions, Mojave & Catalina (10.14 & 10.15), on BRAND NEW USER ACCOUNTS, created from scratch (ie: Thus, THERE IS ZERO CACHED DATA, nor account setup of any kind, so, it's all new), entered in my professional Google WorkSpace credentials, and the Apple Calendar application similarly fails to show ANY data at all, nor any error messages.

Hopefully Google WorkSpace support can escalate this issue, and get some attention on it, towards getting this issue resolved, as it appears to be a wide spread issue affecting many users on many different computers and various operating systems.

So, just to be clear, this is GOOGLE server side issues, and not client side, nor cache cleaning, none of which will work.

Thanks,

Daniel

[Personal Information Edited by Moderator]

I don't think there is an actual fix for this. The people who've achieved a fix probably had some lucky timing. This seems to be more of a server-side issue than a client-side one. The reason it seems that way is because of how widespread it is across different Macs and OS versions. FWIW it seems to only be affecting sync with the Mac. iPhone still seems good. The only thing that deleting caches and all that nonsense did for me was to stop the server error message, but it still doesn't retrieve anything. We're just going to have to wait this one out and use Google Calendar on the browser in the meantime.

To fix mine just now I opened the calendar, had the triangle obviously.. so I went up top and clicked on calendar, then preferences on the menu bar. I selected the iCloud account and under Accounts I unchecked Enable Account and rechecked it. That did not work. However I have a second Google Account, same email address, that I did the same thing, Unchecked Enable Account, then Rechecked it and it reconnected. I guess we'll see if it happens again.

Going into more analysis using logs (In Console - have enabled Calendar http logs) Interesting error observation

[com.apple.calendar.store.log.caldav.http.body] [<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<errors xmlns="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005">

 <error>

  <domain>GData</domain>

  <code>rateLimitExceeded</code>

  <internalReason>Quota exceeded for quota metric 'Queries' and limit 'Queries per day' of service 'caldav.googleapis.com' for consumer 'project_number:946018238758'.</internalReason>

 </error>]

This might be the cause of the issue - I guess some kind of rate limiting is going on at Google's end - so this might be resulting in a seemingly intermittent issue coming up. I don't know if this is being applied to GSuite accounts (or as a while across all accounts - which seems more likely). Am trying out with normal gmail (personal ) to see if this issue occurs there as well.

I was still having the problem today, but this time when I deleted and re-added my accounts, it worked, as opposed to yesterday when that type of reset action did nothing.