PSA: Waze Disables Police Alerts Worldwide Due to Major Bugs - UPDATED

The issue was first noticed by users who configured routes with police traps appearing in the route preview screen. Shortly after starting navigation, users noticed they were not getting the alerts when driving through the flagged location.

While everybody believed it was a widespread problem that the Google-owned company was working on fixing, the police alerts have actually been disabled by Waze specifically to resolve bugs in the app.

A product expert on the Waze support groups explains that "alerts have been turned off in the app for now." The reason is that the developing team is working on fixing bugs that appeared this week. Previously, they said developers "think they have it solved," but the work continues until everything works as expected.

The bottom line is that police alerts are now off in Waze, and the entire user base should be affected, regardless of their location. Several users have confirmed on reddit and the Waze forums that police alerts are no longer available in Portugal, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Australia, Brazil, and Cyprus.

No workaround is available, considering Waze disabled the feature with a server-side switch. Some users believed the issue was caused by a recent update, so they downgraded Waze to a previous build. Nothing works, though, as Waze no longer pushes police alerts from its servers to users' devices, so the problem isn't happening locally. It affects Waze on all platforms, including Android Auto and CarPlay.

Meanwhile, everything else works correctly in Waze, so if you're not using the app specifically for police alerts – which I'm sure many people do – you might not even notice the issue.

A temporary solution could be switching to another application until Waze resolves the bug. Google Maps has recently been updated with incident reporting on all platforms, including Android Auto and CarPlay, but it does not support all report types integrated into Waze. Users can still report mobile speed cameras alongside other common hazards, such as roadworks and stalled vehicles.

However, the bigger problem with Google Maps is that it doesn't have the same gigantic user base as Waze, so the number of reports is significantly smaller. Google Maps has recently started importing more reports from Waze, including for speed cameras, as Google is trying to improve the adoption of incident reporting in its flagship mapping product.

Waze did not provide an ETA for the fix, but considering it's a major problem, it should be resolved in the coming hours. I expect the police alerts to be re-enabled by Monday, but I'll continue to monitor the investigation and update the article when a fix is live.