Blocked tiles

If you have followed a hyperlink or URL to this page, you are using an application or webpage that we have blocked for violating OpenStreetMap's tile usage policy.

If you are a user of the application/website

If you are using a mobile or desktop application, please check if there is a new version of the application that fixes the map. Otherwise, if there are no updates yet, or if you are using a Web application or webpage, please contact its author and let them know about the problem. You may wish to link them to this page you are currently reading.

How to contact the software's developers

Whilst we do not hold contact details for developers using our tiles, you may be able to contact the developer of your website or application using the below general tips.

• Android Applications: Contact details for application developers can be found on the Google Play store under the "App support" section. You can long-press an application icon on the home screen, then tap "App info", then follow the "App details" link to access the Google Play Store page for an application. (Other application stores and non-stock Android may have slightly different processes.)
• Apple applications: Contact details for application developers can be found on the Apple App store under the "Information" section ("App Support" link).
• Websites: Attempt to contact the website's support team via their "Contact us", "Help", "Support" or other systems/tools they recommend on their website.

If you need the map urgently or are unable to reach the developer, please see a list of available OpenStreetMap-based applications for Android, iOS and iPadOS, or other operating system platforms.

Privacy settings & extensions

In the event you are using enhanced privacy settings and/or extensions in your browser, these might be the cause of the block you can observe. More specifically:

• All browsers: you must send a valid User-Agent
• All browsers: caching of content must be enabled, but still may be cleared by the end of session (private browsing) or manual cache cleanup
• On Firefox, if you changed the network.http.sendRefererHeader configuration option to any value other than 2 then you might see the error described in #Referer is required.
  • The Tor Browser stopped sending Referer headers when on .onion domains since 2017, meaning OSM maps may not work from hidden services. The website owner should switch to an alternate map tile provider instead.

If you are the owner/a developer of the application/website

Interactive maps are made of a grid of square images, or tiles. As it stands, your software downloads these tiles directly from our servers, which are subject to our tile usage policy.

To determine why you were blocked and how to remedy it, read the error on the map tiles, and find which of the sections below applies.

Referer is required

If the tile mentions "Referer is required" then you were automatically blocked because your application/website is not sending HTTP Referer headers, but doing so is required by the tile usage policy. This block will resolve itself once you make the necessary changes to your application, without further intervention necessary.

For websites/web applications, this can be fixed by setting your Referrer-Policy header to any of no-referrer-when-downgrade, origin, origin-when-cross-origin, strict-origin, or strict-origin-when-cross-origin.

For more information, see the Referer article.

Missing attribution

If the tile mentions "blocked for not attributing" then you were manually blocked for lack of attribution. This block is not automated, once you add the attribution to your website you must notify us about the fix at openstreetmap/tile-attribution in the issue about your software. You will need to create a github.com account, if you do not have one already. If you attempted to contact us elsewhere you will be directed to the issue tracker.

OpenStreetMap is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF). You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. Attribution is formally stated in section 4.3 of the ODbL:

"However, if you Publicly Use a Produced Work, You must include a notice associated with the Produced Work reasonably calculated to make any Person that uses, views, accesses, interacts with, or is otherwise exposed to the Produced Work aware that Content was obtained from the Database, Derivative Database, or the Database as part of a Collective Database, and that it is available under this License."

In this example, the credit appears in the corner of the map:

Example of properly attributing OpenStreetMap contributors.

It is the responsibility of those who publicly use OpenStreetMap data to ensure the attribution fulfills its purpose and makes the user aware of the provenance of the data. You need to actively communicate this information to the user to meet these requirements. Merely making it available to users who are actively seeking this information is not enough.

General block

If the tile mentions the more general "not following the tile usage policy" then review the tile usage policy closely.

Your application may be overwhelming our servers and hitting limits for a variety of reasons.

Misidentification: all tile requests must be identifiable to a particular website or application. For websites, #Referer is required. For applications, requests must contain a proper, unique and identifiable User-Agent. Incorrect, spoofed or non-existent identification may result in rejected requests.

Scraping: fetching too many tiles for an extended period of time is considered bulk downloading, which is not allowed. If you wish to copy/back up map data, consider downloading Planet.osm or its regional subsets instead.

Lack of rate-limiting: downloading tiles too quickly affects servers' ability to provide tiles to others in a timely manner. If your application is known for that behavior, it may be blocked.

No caching: downloading the same tiles repeatedly due to improper response caching can also result in blocking. Make sure no Cache-Control: no-cache or Pragma: no-cache headers are present.

Why do we block applications?

OpenStreetMap is a volunteer project. We rely on the goodwill of our volunteers and kind donations to operate our expensive servers. We do not put adverts on our map, and cannot fund the huge number of servers that would be required to give everyone free map images. Rather, we publish the raw map data collected by our dedicated volunteer mappers. Other people can render maps from this data.

Unfortunately, some people have published or even sold applications that are misusing our servers. This is costing us more than our volunteers can afford to fund. By slowing down the servers, it also makes it harder for our mappers to draw the maps – which is the whole reason this project exists.

This is a real problem. At one point, one single application was responsible for 30% of the traffic going through our servers.

We have a clear Tile usage policy which asks applications making heavy use to set up their own map image servers (using the map data we give them for free), or use third-party servers. Unfortunately, several applications have not heeded this. We are left with no choice but to block them.

For third-party alternatives, see commercial software and services. For help on setting up your own server, see Develop.