Waze is showing drivers their location as more than 100 miles from where they actually stand, a malfunction tied to deliberate GPS signal spoofing by a government.
The disruption affects Israel and its surrounding region, where military authorities broadcast false GPS coordinates to confuse the navigation systems of incoming drones and missiles. The interference corrupts civilian GPS receivers in the process.
How Spoofing Works
GPS spoofing involves transmitting counterfeit satellite signals at a higher power than the real ones, causing receivers — including those in smartphones — to lock onto the false coordinates instead of the genuine ones. The device then calculates and displays an entirely wrong position.
Israel’s military has used the technique extensively since the October 2023 escalation of conflict in Gaza, and the affected zone has expanded. Pilots flying into Ben Gurion Airport have reported navigation anomalies, and civil aviation authorities have issued repeated warnings.
Scale of the Disruption
The GPSJam.org interference monitoring service, which aggregates aircraft navigation data, shows persistent high-interference zones across Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Iraq and Cyprus. On some days, the disrupted area stretches across much of the eastern Mediterranean.
Waze, which Google owns, relies on the device’s GPS signal to determine position. When that signal carries false coordinates, the app has no independent means to correct it — it maps wherever the spoofed signal says the user is.
Users in Tel Aviv have reported the app placing them in locations inside Cyprus, Egypt, or deep inside Lebanese territory. Some have been shown positions in the middle of the sea.
Not a Waze Bug
The issue does not originate inside the app. Neither Waze nor Google has altered the software. The problem sits at the hardware and signal layer, upstream of any application.
Smartphone GPS chips receive satellite signals passively. They have no mechanism to verify authenticity — a known architectural weakness that defense researchers have documented for years in peer-reviewed literature, including a widely cited 2017 study published by the IEEE that outlined civilian receiver vulnerabilities to spoofing attacks.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has issued multiple safety bulletins warning airlines about GPS and GNSS — the broader term for global navigation satellite systems — interference across the Middle East. Its most recent bulletin covers the eastern Mediterranean and parts of the Black Sea region.
Wider Impact on Navigation
Other navigation apps face the same limitation. Apple Maps, Google Maps, and any service drawing on the device’s raw GPS feed will display the same false position. The spoofing does not target any single application.
Waze declined to comment specifically on the regional disruption. Google did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Civilian GPS was never designed with anti-spoofing protection. The original U.S. Department of Defense architecture, built in the 1970s, prioritized global availability over signal authentication. That design choice left the civilian standard without the encrypted verification signals reserved for military-grade receivers.
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