Google Maps API error: UrlAuthenticationCommonError [SOLVED]

If your website is showing this nasty message in place of Google Maps: Oops! Something went wrong. This page didn’t load Google Maps correctly, and in your browser console there is a Google Maps API error: UrlAuthenticationCommonError, well, you came in the right place.

This error is pretty annoying, mainly because Google doesn’t tell us anything about it (and it isn’t even listed in the error codes list for Google Maps).

What about it, then? By our investigations, it seems to be a Google internal issue, which occurs intermittently (without any change in your code), and that disappears spontaneously after a while. In particular, from our tests, it appeared to be deeply related to Google Maps API keys. We tested the same source code with several API keys from different accounts, and only with a few of them we came accross the error.

Anyway, if you are in a hurry, you could try to speed up the process (as some users did) in the following way: disable, delete, re-enable and re-create all your APIs and keys (or, at least, the ones that give you problems), and see if this fixes the issue for you. If you prefer, you could try with API keys from different accounts instead.

Also, emptying the allowed websites field of the API keys helped in some cases.

For any question or information on the topic, feel free to leave a comment in the form below.