Edit 3/18/22 3:45 PM ET: Google Maps services should be restored after morning outage. Article has been updated to reflect new information.
What you need to know
- Google Maps experienced an outage on Friday morning that affected users globally.
- The outage seemed to primarily affect maps on the web and with apps integrating with the Maps Platform.
- Google has indicated that the issue has been resolved and that services should be back to normal.
- Google will provide more information on what caused the outage following an internal investigation.
Google Maps experienced an outage on Friday morning that appeared to primarily affect the website and the platform that connects Google Maps to third-party applications.
Reports of the outage started gaining traction on Down Detector just after 11 am ET, and the issue was noted on both the Google Maps Platform status board and Google issue tracker.
Google acknowledged the problem earlier on the issue tracker, noting that its teams were working to identify a cause. As of 3:12 pm ET, Google provided an update stating that the outage has been resolved:
"Summary: Google Maps Platform services experiencing high rates of error.
The issue with Google Maps Platform Directions API, Gaming Services, Maps Embed API, Maps JavaScript API, Maps Static API, Cloud Styling has been resolved for all affected users as of Friday, 2022-03-18 12:10 US/Pacific.
We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation.
We thank you for your patience while we worked on resolving the issue."
The outage didn't appear to affect the mobile application much, although some users noticed that it was slower to load or respond.
It's still unclear what caused the outage, but reports on the issue tracker indicated that it was affecting users and businesses globally. However, after a couple of hours, the tune started to change as the service recovered.
