Google shuts down Map Maker service over a wee technical difficulty

Google has shut down its Map Maker service after a series of embarrassing oversights allowed vandalism - the most notorious example being an image of a Google Android robot urinating on the Apple logo.

The company said it had been moderating all user-generated edits to try to prevent such pranks, but found it impossible to keep up.

Visitors to the Google site were directed on Monday to a forum post that explained the site would be unavailable for editing until a solution could be found.

Pavithra Kanakarajan, a Google Map Maker product manager, wrote: "As some of you know already, we have been experiencing escalated attacks to spam Google Maps over the past few months. The most recent incident was particularly troubling and unfortunate - a strong user in our community chose to go and create a large scale prank on the Map. As a consequence, we suspended auto-approval and user moderation across the globe, till we figured out ways to add more intelligent mechanisms to prevent such incidents.

"If we do not have the capacity to review edits at roughly the rate they come in, we have to take a pause. All of our edits are currently going through a manual review process."

Google introduced Map Maker in 2008 as a tool to allow users of Google Maps to edit the information on the service directly. While the majority of the mapping information is bought in from third-party providers, those providers fall short of universal coverage, particularly in some nations where location information is controlled by government regulations.