Users had difficulty searching for places on Google Maps Friday morning, in a widespread outage affecting both the desktop and mobile app versions of the service. It was out for over three hours, coming back online for some users from around 14:00 ET / 11: 00 PT.
Even when the maps are visible, users can not search for places or get directions for walking, driving, transit or cycling. Furthermore, Maps is not able to retrieve data that is not already stored on a user’s device, so when users zoom out of their current location, Google displays a blank map.
“Wow, I’ve never seen a Google Maps crash like this before,” said one user tweeted.
According to Downdetector, users started reporting disruptions at 11:13 ET / 8:13 PT. More and more users were reporting disruptions at the time of publication, up from 12,735 reports at 12:29 PM ET / 9:29 PM PT.
A 90-minute outbreak is endless for Google, whose maps are also the backbone of apps like Waze and maps used in tech stacks for companies like Snapchat, Lyft, Accenture and Square. Since the time of writing, there have been no problems calling a lift or seeing other users’ posts on Snapchat, although some Twitter users say they have trouble downloading the Airbnb map layer. Protocol reached these companies for comment.
Many users have taken to Twitter to say that the outage has disrupted their pendulums. “The day I hit three outside burbs in Edmonton for interviews, Google Maps stops. Wow,” one reads tweet. “WHY THE HELL GOOGLE MAPS ONLY ONLY IF I FORGET THE DIRECTIONS,” reads aner.
The problem seems to be worldwide. By 2019, more than a billion people would use Google Maps to get directions each month, according to the company, with 5 billion users using apps that had Google Maps in their tech stack internationally. By the fall of 2021, 10 billion people had downloaded Google Maps in the Google Play Store alone. Google did not publish Total Maps Downloads or Users in 2022.
“We can confirm that the technical problem of the past is now fixed,” a Google spokesman told the minutes. “All affected Google Maps and Google Maps platform services are now up and running worldwide.”
This article has been updated to include a statement from Google.
Add Comment