Most of us rely on real-time mapping software to tell us the best ways to get around, but it might be a good idea to cross-reference them. German drivers learned this the hard way on Thursday when Google Maps said that many of the country’s popular autobahns were closed.
Chaos ensued. Google Maps is one of the most popular mapping apps, and many users took the software at its word (hard to blame them, since it’s usually quite accurate). There were traffic jams as people searched for alternate routes, and some even reported the closures to the police over concerns about a terrorist attack or government hack. But if they had taken a moment to check another platform like Apple Maps or Waze, they would have seen that the roads were open.
A Google spokesperson told German media outlets that the company had no comment on what caused the issue, but they noted the three key sources from which Google Maps gets its information: individual users, public sources and third-party providers. Perhaps the data coming from one of those sources was incorrect, or the platform’s new AI features hallucinated the closures.
