While it doesn’t appear that Apple has released an update to solve this problem at this point, several Apple Support reps found a way to fix the issue in the short term.Little Snitch, the firewall and network filter that tells you which macOS apps leak data to servers outside your local network, has been upgraded to version 5. How to fix Apple News download bug in macOS Big Sur If you’re not sure if you’re Mac is affected, you can keep an eye on Activity Monitor or use a third-party app like Little Snitch to find out. Notably, even for users who have cable or fiber internet, ISPs often cap data and usage this big is pushing people over their limits and causing overage fees.Īnother important point is that this bug could be affecting a lot more people than it appears since there’s nothing that would tip you off to go looking for it unless you’ve hit your data cap or regularly monitor your download/upload activity. Several dozen other users have chimed in that they’re seeing the problem too with another person noting they’re seeing around 60GB of downloads daily from the same Apple News process.

Both have valid signed certificates by Apple according to Little Snitch.

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.Īnd specifically the downloaded traffic occurred with hostnames apple.news and c.apple.news. 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. 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. Paul noticed that on macOS Big Sur, an Apple News app process called newsd was downloading huge amounts of data in the background. The Apple News download bug was raised on the Apple support forums at the end of December by user paulfromminnetonka (h/t Nate). While Apple hasn’t issued a patch to the app itself, there is another way to fix the Apple News download bug that’s causing background downloads of up to 60GB+ a day. The Apple News app seems to have a flaw in macOS Big Sur that’s causing very large background downloads for some users.

Little snitch big sur