Problem
We have been successfully using the Google Maps API on our website for a long time. We switched from v2 to v3 almost two years ago without any problems. But from today, we sometimes see JavaScript pop-ups appearing on our pages. The problem may be for a longer time, but we noticed only today. Alerts do not appear on every pageview, but about once out of 20 pageviews using Google Maps (rating). Warnings contain the following error:
Google has disabled the use of the Maps API for this application. The key provided is not a valid Google API key, or it is not permitted for the Google 3 Javascript API on this site. If you are the owner of this application, you can find out about obtaining a valid key here: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/tutorial#api_key
You can see the warning in action right here: http://www.uitzendbureau.nl/uitzendbureaus/boxmeer (and on all other pages of our site with Google Maps, please note that it appears only once out of twenty page views).
Possible causes investigated
Last changes
We did not make any changes to our code, we did not use the new auth key, and there were no other actions on our side that could cause this.
Experimental version
A few hours ago, we noticed that we could use the experimental version of the API because we did not include the version of the API in our request. I added v=3 , but this did not fix the problem.
Authentication key
We use the same key both in our development environment and in real time (in a different domain), and both environments display the same error. I tried to create a new auth key, but the new key gave us the same results.
API request limits
I suppose this cannot be caused by exceeding the API limits. Yes, we exceed the 25k card load several days a week, but I quote the following from https://developers.google.com/maps/usagelimits/ :
What happens if I cross the limit? If your site exceeds 25,000 card downloads per day for 90 consecutive days, Google will try to contact you with information about payment options. At this time, we will indicate the date for the purchase; Until this time, your website will continue to operate as expected, without any change in how the maps appear. After the deadline, if you didn’t activate billing and don’t acquire the Google Maps API API to work, the maps on your website will continue to work, but only for the first 25,000 map downloads every day. In addition to this number, the Maps API will stop functioning.
We never contacted Google, and we were never provided with any deadlines.
A few hours ago, we tried to increase the user speed limit from 1 req per user per second to 2 reqs per user per second. So far this has not made any difference, but I do not know how long this change will be applied. However, I do not think that we have reached this limit, because I still see an error message on pages with one map, while updating the page at a very low speed.
Update
Google confirmed and fixed this error in its API: https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=7464