The Maps On Snapchat And A Number Of Other Apps Showed NYC As 'Jewtropolis' This Morning

It was another dystopian morning online, as people opened Snapchat, the Weather Channel, the CitiBike app, the New York Times and StreetEasy to find that their maps labeled New York City as "Jewtropolis."

All of these sites and services use Mapbox, a third-party map API, which appeared to have been hit by antisemitic vandals. Snapchat told a user on Twitter that it is "working with our partner Mapbox to get this fixed immediately."

The Verge reports that "[t]he changes appeared to be visible as early as 5AM ET. By around 9AM, it appeared that the maps were in the process of being fixed, with the offensive name only being visible at certain view levels on some maps." However, at 9:46 AM we still saw the offensive label on a Weather Channel map viewed on a desktop browser:

We've reached out to the Weather Channel for comment and we'll update this story with more information as it becomes available. 

Update, 11:30 AM: A Weather Company spokesperson tells me that the problem "has been fixed at the source and is no longer showing." After clearing our cookies, we confirmed that the slur no longer appears on Weather.com's maps. (If you're still seeing it, try clearing your cache.)

Update, 2 PM: Mapbox CEO Eric Gunderson has released a statement explaining how the slur found its way onto the company's maps:

Typically, our validation system prevents malicious edits from entering the system from any third party data source. Our AI system flags more than 70,000 map changes a day for human review. While our AI immediately flagged this, in the manual part of the review process a human error led to this incident.

Security experts are working to determine the exact origin of this malicious hate speech. We apologize to customers and users who were exposed to this disgusting attack.

Read Gunderson's full statement at Tech Crunch.