The Google Maps Platform team strives to provide the highest level of service possible to our users. Still, from time to time, unexpected service disruptions do occur. When your team experiences an outage or other technical challenge, one of the first evaluations they need to make is whether the issue is with a third-party service provider or in-house. As part of our commitment to transparency and speed when communicating the status of our products, and incidents when they happen to occur, we’ve rolled out the Google Maps Platform Public Status Dashboard.

The Public Status Dashboard provides status information on the products that are generally available and covered by the Google Maps Platform SLA. You can check the dashboard to view the current status of any of those services. You can even click ‘View History’ to see incidents that occurred over the past 365 days. Incidents shown on the dashboard are classified as either Disruptions (orange) or Outages (red), depending on their severity. All incidents are first verified by our support engineers, so there may be a slight delay from the time they actually occurred. 

For quick access to the dashboard, you can bookmark the site. And in the near future, you'll be able to consume web feeds for push notifications. If you experience an issue that’s not listed on the dashboard, contact Support. And to learn more about what's posted on the dashboard check out this FAQ. 

The Public Status Dashboard is the first place to check when you discover an issue is affecting you. But it’s not the only way we communicate known or reported issues and provide support. Depending on your particular situation and needs, you might also want to use one of our other resources. Here’s a rundown of some others you should get to know: 

Issue TrackerOur public Issue Tracker is where we actively maintain a list of known and reported issues. The issue tracker includes technical issues that would not be severe enough to be surfaced in the Status Dashboard. This is where you can easily view already-reported bugs and add your own comments to help our teams investigate issues or identify workarounds. In the event we experience an outage, a banner message will appear in the Maps Support section of the Google Cloud Console, with a link to the issue tracker for more information to give you real-time status on the issue. Whether you want to report a bug or have a new feature request, get started by filing a request. Including sample code or a screen capture will help us identify the issue and respond faster.

Email notification groupsTo get technical updates about Google Maps Platform products, outage notifications, and feature announcements, you should subscribe to our email notification group to get updates straight to your inbox. 

Essential Contacts Soon, we’ll start sending important notifications to your Essential Contacts. To customize which team members receive these Google Maps Platform notifications in the near future, you can set your Essential Contacts in the Google Cloud Console by providing your own list of contacts. You can add individuals as well as group aliases to make sure you’re preemptively reducing the impact of personnel changes. You can learn more about notification categories and how to enable Essential Contacts here. 

Visit our incident management documentation to learn more. And for more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.