If the green, yellow, orange and red congestion lines have vanished from your map, you are not imagining it and you have not broken a setting. Google Maps traffic lines have stopped rendering for a large number of users, leaving every road drawn in plain grey no matter how badly it is backed up. Google has not acknowledged the problem publicly and has given no fix timeline.
What the Google Maps traffic lines bug looks like
The colour overlay is what is missing, not the data behind it. Routing, ETAs and road closures still appear to work — Maps is still using live traffic to pick your route, it simply is not painting it on the map. The practical loss is the at-a-glance check: you can no longer glance down and see that the road you were about to take is solid red, or eyeball an alternative before you commit to one.
Reports differ on how wide the blast radius is, and that is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Android Authority describes it hitting Android, iOS and the desktop web. Coverage from Gadget Hacks and autoevolution centres on Android Auto specifically, where drivers see grey roads on the car display while the same phone shows the colours normally once it is unplugged. That is the same Maps-on-Android-Auto surface Google has been actively reworking, having only just started rolling out immersive navigation on Android Auto. Gadget Hacks specifically points at Google Maps 26.28.03 paired with Android Auto 17.2, with some testers on the 17.3 beta reporting no problem — unconfirmed, and not something to update on the strength of.
What to try, and what not to bother with
There is no real fix, because this is not something on your phone. Users have already worked through the obvious list without success:
- Doesn’t work: toggling the traffic layer off and on
- Doesn’t work: clearing the Maps cache or clearing app data
- Doesn’t work: reinstalling Android Auto, or rebooting the phone
- Doesn’t work: switching Google accounts, or using incognito mode
- Sometimes works, in the car: tapping the North Up button to switch the map to top-down orientation before you set off, which has restored the colours for some Android Auto users
Beyond that, leave automatic updates on for both Maps and Android Auto and wait. If a version pairing is genuinely the cause, the repair arrives as an app update or a server-side flag flip, and there is nothing useful to do in the meantime.
The bigger irritation is the silence
A missing colour layer is a nuisance, not a safety failure — the navigation is still routing you around the jam. What is harder to defend is that a service with more than a billion users can visibly lose a core feature across platforms with no status page, no acknowledgement and no estimate, leaving everyone affected to work out from forum threads whether the fault is theirs or Google’s. People have spent an afternoon reinstalling apps and clearing data for a bug that was never on their device. A one-line confirmation would have saved all of it.
Sources: Android Authority, Gadget Hacks, autoevolution
