Mac Calendar "Server responded with an error" message

The server responded with an error (screen shot below)

it is referencing my Gmail account

2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

11.2.1 macOS

What should I do?

How can I fix it?



[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Posted on Feb 11, 2021 9:51 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 19, 2021 8:05 PM

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.

249 replies

Mar 3, 2021 8:35 PM in response to cacloes282

I did nothing to my three machines calendars who were all have this issue daily, and since last night about midnight EST, they have all behaved perfectly, updating and syncing once a min. and no errors. Still working flawlessly now almost 24 hrs later. I will probably jinx it by posting this message, but my guess is that Google and Apple have found the issue with the servers and fixed it. I do not think any of the "fixes" that have been posted and all the settings changes did anything at all to fix this problem. I think it was on their server side but intermittent and seemingly time of day related, and hopefully they have now fixed it.

Mar 5, 2021 7:23 PM in response to istarus

One more follow up. It seems to me that Google/Apple have fixed the issue with no action needed on the user's part. I has been three days now since I last saw the error message on a Google Calendar in the Mac Calendar app. This is on all three of my Macs. Thank you to all who fixed this at the server end. I guess we will never hear a final, "Oh we found the issue and it was X and is fixed now" but well done anyway.

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Mac Calendar "Server responded with an error" message

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