The Waze navigation application is the victim of a bug changing users’ default language, according to multiple testimonies on social networks. Hebrew, Turkish, or even Russian… This Wednesday, many drivers had difficulty following the directions of the popular application belonging to the American giant Google.
The outage, notably identified by BFMTV in France, was widely reported on the Downdetector site, which lists bugs on the various mobile applications. At midday, the application was the subject of nearly 2,000 incident reports. According to the various publications that we were able to observe on social networks, the outage seems to have been observed internationally, with French-speaking, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking Internet users having reported it.
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Google is working on a fix
The bug also appears to have affected the units of measurement – switching to miles – and the car icons displayed on the real-time map. For some users, the traditional blue arrow has been replaced by a pick-up, a motorcycle, or even… a dragon.
“I opened my Waze just now and the map doesn’t sound weird, the application is in Hebrew, a weird car appears, the meter goes in miles, and I can’t change it back to French is that normal? “, for example, asked a French user on X (ex-Twitter). “My Waze suddenly went Arabic and has Shrek’s dragon as a car? “, pointed out another, incredulously.
Contacted by our colleagues at BFMTV, Google assured that its teams were working on a fix. “We are aware of an issue regarding Waze users’ language selection and are working to resolve it,” said a company spokesperson. At the end of the afternoon, our teams did not observe any outages in the application.
