Did Your Google Maps Timeline History Just Disappear? You're Far From Alone

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

TL;DR

Google Maps saves your past travel data to a personal Timeline.
The Timeline has been undergoing some recent changes, as Google transitions to on-device storage.
Within the past day, a growing number of Maps users have noticed their Timeline is no longer accessible.

The past few months have introduced a big change to the way we keep track of where we’ve been when using the Timeline feature of Google Maps. After years of tying that information to your account in an easily accessible manner, last year Google started pushing Maps users to transition to on-device Timeline, where their movement data is only for that specific phone. As the deadline approached, users were prompted to make decisions about keeping their existing history, which was anxiety-inducing enough by itself — who wants to risk losing years of Timeline data? Now those fears are once again resurfacing, as a number of Maps users see their Timelines vanish.

This seems to be a recent trend, with reports on Reddit from users like ashtreylil and hardrivethrutown popping up within the past 24 hours to the r/GoogleMaps sub, as spotted by 9to5Google. Plenty of commenters chime in to those posts to share similar stories of their own.

Rita El Khoury / Android Authority

Affected users describe not being able to view any past events in their Timeline, nor access backups saved to their personal cloud. If you’re the kind of Maps user who loves taking a trip down memory lane and uses that old Timeline data to help, the thought of years of trips suddenly disappearing sounds devastating.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that it is not at all clear that any of this Timeline data is actually being destroyed, and it’s entirely possible that what we’re dealing with here is more of a glitch interfering with users’ ability to access it. It’s difficult to diagnose definitively from just these circumstantial reports, but at least some people who describe their Timeline recently vanishing have also seen it reappear.

We haven’t observed this bug on our own devices, so whatever might be happening, it doesn’t appear to be impacting all Maps users equally. We’ve reached out to Google in the hopes of illuminating what’s actually going on here, and maybe even learn if there’s any path forward towards restoring the missing Timelines. We’ll update you with anything we’re able to learn.

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