On Tuesday, we saw a huge increase in traffic on Google Maps. The traffic spike was so large that our servers thought they were being DoS attacked. It turned out that the additional traffic was due to 100Ks of people constantly refreshing maps about the terrible wildfires in Southern California. Several news outlets and individuals had used the My Maps feature to create maps that tracked the spread of the fire and included information on evacuation alerts and evacuation center locations. (For those of you who haven’t been reading US news, these wildfires scorched 2K km2 of land and caused 1M people to be evacuated from their homes)

the wildfires, behind the scenes

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