New York City was renamed "Jewtropolis" on maps used by hundreds of apps, including Snapchat and the Financial Times.
For about four hours on Thursday, users of apps using Mapbox could see the anti-Semitic slur over where the word New York would usually be.
The tech company provides online maps for websites and apps including Snapchat, CitiBike, Lonely Planet, The Weather Channel, Foursquare and the Financial Times.
Mapbox's founder, Eric Gunderson, said it was "disgusting" and was an act of human vandalism.
He said they managed to quickly remove the wording from the hundreds of apps which use its data, with more than 420 million users worldwide.
Whatever mapping service that Snapchat, CitiBike, StreetEasy, (perhaps others) use — it seems — is showing New York City as "Jewtropolis" this morning. pic.twitter.com/nsVe8goLyo
— Micah Grimes (@MicahGrimes) August 30, 2018
Snapchat said the incident was "deeply offensive" and it had worked with Mapbox to "get this fixed immediately".
Users of several different apps posted screenshots of the map, questioning why the city had been renamed.
A statement from Mapbox said it had deleted the information "within an hour" and that the same source attempted "several other hateful edits".
"We build systems so this does not happen," it said.
The company said its AI system "flags more than 70,000 map changes a day for human review" and that its AI "immediately flagged" it but in the manual part of the review a "human error led to this incident".
"Security experts are working to determine the exact origin of this malicious hate speech," the statement added.
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"We apologise to customers and users who were exposed to this disgusting attack.
"We will continue to investigate this act and make appropriate changes to further limit the potential for future human error."
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Sky News
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