Apple confirms Maps outage: ‘Directions not available’ (Updated)

Apple’s Maps, the default mapping and driving directions application for iOS and Macs, experienced a rare but major outage today, as directions became unavailable across all of Apple’s devices. The outage has been acknowledged on Apple’s status page as affecting both Maps Search and Routing & Navigation, and appears to be hitting users across many countries.

Though Apple Maps initially launched to a tidal wave of criticism, it has slowly but surely gained millions of users thanks to a number of improvements to its features, map data, and user interface. Additionally, Maps has benefited from being the sole source of directions when users ask for assistance from Siri, enabling an in-car voice request for driving guidance to nearby businesses or locations to automatically start providing spoken and visual directions.

As of publish time, Maps is experiencing noticeable delays in providing point of interest results and is refusing to provide directions. It is also failing to turn up new search results, though it is still capable of retrieving data for past searches. When the Maps app is loaded on an iPad, iPhone, or Mac, a generic error response, “Directions Not Available,” appears on screen whenever directions are requested. Similarly, Siri says that it “can’t seem to access that data right now” and asks users to “try again in a little while.”

While the Apple Maps outage continues, iOS and Mac users should fall back to using Google Maps — assuming they haven’t just continued to do so over the years. For Siri users, we’ll update this article whenever the “little while” wait for spoken directional assistance is over.

Updated at 10:28 a.m. Pacific: After several hours of service outages, Apple has restored both search and directions functionality to Maps.