Google Maps Down For About 6 Hours For Many People Around The World

Google Maps is the most popular navigation app.

Not only because it packs lots of useful features for commuting and travelling, but also it's because of Google's ubiquitous presence in the business and on Android.

If those aren't enough to proof that Google Maps is a must-have app, an outage that took place has turned the world directionless.

It all began when Google Maps started failing to load its maps on a number of users devices.

Then more people started complaining, and more, and more from all over the world.

To some of those people, Google Maps was able to load its maps, but its navigation feature stopped working. To those people, pulling the directions to user-defined addresses no longer worked.

During the outage, Google Maps only worked as long as users have previously saved the maps as offline maps on their device.

Google Maps is a product used by billions of people around the world, and used by more than 5 million apps and websites. Because of that, the incident has caused quite a struggle for anyone and anything that relied on Google Maps.

The outage essentially created havoc.

As a result of this, lots of users took their issues to Twitter, complaining how they were left directionless and how they got lost.

Fellow netizens then confirmed that Google Maps on desktop also experienced issues.

Users also posted memes which mocked the increased dependency of smartphone users on online navigational tools like Google Maps.

It is said that 48% of Maps users had problems with the app, and 47% reported problems with the Google Maps website.

"We’re seeing reports of difficulties accessing some Google Maps and Google Maps Platform services. Our team is investigating and working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible," a spokesperson from Google said.

“Multiple Google Maps Platform services experiencing high rates of error, including several Web Services and the Maps Javascript API and services."

Hours and hours later, people were still complaining.

It was only after six hours, that Google came up with a fix.

Google didn't explain nor detailed the incident or what caused it. But according to Google Maps platform status dashboard, the incident affected multiple Maps services, including the direction API, places library and more.

"Multiple Geo Enterprise services experiencing high rates of error. Mitigation work is currently underway by our engineering team," Google later responded.

"Maps API Services are starting to return to normal," the company later said.

Google confirmed that all the issues affecting Google Maps were resolved for all users globally at 2:42 AM IST.

Read: Google Maps Is No Longer The King Of Navigation And Offline Maps