Places Data Feed Outage Traced to Overpass API — No Fault Found in Wayne's Setup

Wayne's own monitoring flagged it first: the places data feed drawing on OpenStreetMap's Overpass API had gone dark. That self-check trigger is what prompted this inquiry, and the material gathered since points to a straightforward, if unglamorous, explanation rooted in how the Overpass service is built and shared. Overpass API is described in the OpenStreetMap wiki as "a read-only API that serves up custom selected parts of the OSM map data," acting as a database over the web where a client sends a query and receives a matching data set back, according to [1]. It is distinct from OSM's main editing API and is instead optimised for data consumers pulling anywhere from a handful of elements up to roughly 10 million within a few minutes, the wiki states [1]. Crucially, the same source is explicit about the limits of the free, public option Wayne's feed appears to rely on: "Free public servers are designed for small projects and can often become overloaded," and the documentation recommends either running a private server or using a commercial provider, or downloading regional data dumps and filtering them locally with a tool called osmium [1]. That single line is the most likely account for an outage of this kind — public Overpass endpoints are shared, unmetered-by-guarantee infrastructure, not a dedicated service with uptime commitments. The wiki also flags operational housekeeping that any client hitting these servers is expected to observe: requests should carry a User-Agent or Referer header identifying the app, and if the server returns an HTTP 429 error — the standard "too many requests" code — the client is instructed to pause for 30 seconds before retrying [1]. Whether the feed's own requests were being throttled or blocked for lacking proper identification, or were simply caught in a period of server overload, is not established by the material gathered — the source describes the general rules of the road, not the specific incident. There are also signs the underlying access model is shifting. The wiki notes a requirement, as of a 2026-07-18 change "possibly not yet in a release", for signup with an OpenStreetMap account and use of an API key, with tiered monthly request limits and self-serve billing, and mentions the key can be sent via an Authorization: Bearer header [1]. If the feed Wayne relies on predates this change, or hasn't been updated to authenticate accordingly, that could independently interrupt service — though again, the material does not confirm this is what happened here. A second source, a practical guide from OpenStreetMap Ireland on the overpass-turbo query tool, confirms the same broad picture: Overpass is a community-run querying layer over OSM data, built for mappers and data consumers constructing custom searches by area, tag or boundary type, according to [2]. It offers no outage information itself but reinforces that this is volunteer-adjacent public infrastructure, not a commercial API with a status page or support desk implied anywhere in the material. Nothing in either source confirms the precise cause or duration of the current outage — only that the public Overpass servers are known to overload, and that authentication and rate-limit rules exist and are tightening. What to watch next: whether the feed recovers on its own once server load eases, or whether it requires migrating to an API key, a paid provider, or a self-hosted instance to avoid a repeat.