Apple Maps has a reputation for being “broken,” in the sense that it will send you to a place far from where you want to go. But starting early this morning, Apple Maps has been broken in the sense that it isn’t working at all. The service appears to be completely down, and loading directions or searching for locations doesn’t appear to work on iPhones or iPads.
It appears that you can still load the map display, so if you want to hark back to the days before turn-by-turn directions were a thing, time to fire up that digital compass and get navigating.
Apple has confirmed the issue with a status change on its support site, although there’s no timeline for when the issue will be fixed, or what caused it. Users have been filing complaints on the Apple Support forums, and as per usual when any free online service goes down for longer than 10 seconds, everyone on Twitter is complaining. The Down Detector, a crowd-sourced service that highlights these kinds of issues, has confirmed that the problem is widespread and not limited to one geographic area.
Obviously, this is an excellent and logical time to do what you should have done years ago, and download the Google Maps app for free from the iOS or Android app stores, or just visit it in your browser via maps.google.com. Who knows — maybe you’ll try it and finally see how the rest of us have been living for the past decade.
