Many BalloonsHow to remember birthdays without Facebook
Updated 2026-10-28
For about a decade, Facebook was most people's birthday calendar. Then it quietly stopped being one — and if that is where your dates live, they are stuck inside an app you have to open to see them.
What changed
Until the middle of 2019 Facebook published your friends’ birthdays as a calendar feed. You subscribed to it once in Apple Calendar, Outlook or Google Calendar, and every birthday appeared alongside your own appointments for ever.
That export was removed in June 2019, without an announcement. Facebook’s help pages still describe exporting events to an external calendar; birthdays are no longer part of it. Third-party browser extensions and scripts have tried to fill the gap since, and they break whenever the page they scrape changes.
So if you are still using Facebook to remember birthdays today, you are doing it the only way that is left: opening the app and reading the list. Which works right up until the day you don’t open the app.
The two problems worth separating
Getting the dates out is a one-time job. Being reminded is a forever job. People usually try to solve both with the same tool, and that is why it keeps failing — a calendar you have to look at is not a reminder.
Getting the dates out, once
Facebook still shows you the birthdays it knows about. On the web, open the Events page and look for the birthdays panel; in the mobile app, birthdays appear in the menu under Events. You can read the current month and the upcoming ones.
There is no bulk export, so whatever you do next is a copy-out:
- Type the ones that matter into Contacts. Not all of them. The thirty or forty people whose birthday you would actually feel bad about missing. Open each person in Contacts, tap Edit, then “add birthday”.
- Or import them. Many Balloons reads the birthdays Facebook has for your friends, puts them in a stack, and you swipe through to pick whose dates to keep. The ones you skip are not stored.
Either way, the dates are now somewhere you control, and the number of people you track is a decision you made rather than a list of everyone you have ever added.
Being reminded, forever
A date in a calendar is a note to yourself that you will see only if you look. An all-day event at the top of a day you were already busy is very easy to scroll past.
What actually works is a notification that arrives before you need it:
- A few days of warning, so there is still time to order something or write more than “HBD”.
- Something on the morning itself.
- A list at the start of the month, so the month holds no surprises.
- Extra notice for the ones that matter — a 30th, a 40th, a first birthday.
Many Balloons sends all four. You pick who is on the list, and the reminders keep arriving whether or not you open the app.
What to do about the rest
The people you did not import are not a problem to solve. The honest version of a birthday list is short: close family, the friends you would call, the colleagues you sit next to. If your list has three hundred people on it, you are not going to greet three hundred people, and a notification for each one teaches you to ignore notifications.
Start with the dates you would be upset to miss. You can always add more later, and a list that stays short is a list you keep.
Common questions
Can I still subscribe to a Facebook birthday calendar?
No. Facebook removed the birthday .ics export in June 2019 and has not brought it back. Its own help pages now cover exporting events only, not birthdays.
Do I have to delete my Facebook account to stop relying on it?
No, and that is not the point. The point is that the dates should live somewhere you do not have to open a social network to read. Once they are copied out, Facebook can stay exactly as it is.
What happens to birthdays of people I am no longer friends with?
They disappear from your Facebook birthday list, which is one of the reasons it is a poor place to keep them. A copy you own does not depend on a friendship staying active.
Try it
Importing from Facebook is part of Many Balloons, a birthday reminder app for iPhone. It is free to start, there are no ads, and the people you import stay on your phone.