This decision was made based on recent outage incidents, primarily due to spikes in third party usage, along with an analysis showing that more than a third of maps provided are to non-Wikimedia services (including many to for-profit organizations).

After the most recent incident [2], the service was limited so that only cached maps tiles would be available. While this protected the servers, it made the service unpredictable and highlighted the unsustainability of our tile service. So, we have made the decision to discontinue the maps APIs for non-Wikimedia users.

This change will allow our teams working on Maps to focus on the sustainability of the maps used within Wikimedia projects.

You can follow the implementation of this change on Phabricator [3].

Best,

Erica Litrenta

[1] https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/

[2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20200204-maps