Google Maps Suddenly Went Down & It's Hard To Admit How Lost We Are Without It
Anyone know how to use a compass?
Where are you when we need you, Google Maps?
People around the world were feeling pretty lost on Friday, because Google seemingly lost track of the whole world’s location around noon EST.
Several direction-related Google APIs were dealing with outages on Friday afternoon, Google’s official status page showed. The outage started around 11:30 a.m., according to the website tracker Down Detector.
But you probably didn’t need us to tell you that. If you opened your Google Maps app, you probably found yourself somewhere between "blank" and "void."
Thousands of people turned to social media to complain about the outage.
Others just accepted that they'll be utterly lost for a little while.
Many others confessed that they were turning to (or at least considering) another option: Apple Maps.
Others were forced to rely on their own sense of direction.
You can imagine how that might be going right now.
The online freakout was similar to ones we've seen in the past over Facebook, Instagram and Slack outages, which have left billions of people without something they use every day.
It's pretty rare for Google Maps to be down for an extended period, so we're guessing that people won't be suddenly switching to Waze any time soon.
The service was already starting to come back online around 2:30 p.m., but the outage is still a reminder that we're all super reliant on our smartphones.
So maybe it's time to stash a paper map in your car.
Or... maybe not?
