Snapchat renames New York 'Jewtropolis' in Snap Map

Snacpchat blamed third party mapping data from its partner Mapbox

New York has been renamed "Jewtropolis" within Snapchat's Snap Map feature, after online vandals were apparently able to take it over.

Snap Map is designed to allow users to discover content within specific regions across the world, such as Snaps of sporting events, celebrations and breaking news.

It uses software provided by Mapbox, a separate company that provides custom maps for applications including Foursquare and Lonely Planet. According to Snapchat, this software was the victim of vandalism.

"Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Snap Map relies on third party mapping data which has unfortunately been subject to vandalism," the Snapchat Support account on Twitter responded to a user who shared a screenshot of the map.

"We are working with our partner Mapbox to get this fixed immediately."

Snapchat was not the only company to be affected by the issue. Users of the apps Jump Bike, StreetEasy amd Zillow also reported seeing New York renamed to Jewtropolis.

The change has since been fixed by Mapbox, who apologised to its customers and users for the "disgusting attack" and said the issue was resolved on Thursday morning.

"Mapbox has a zero tolerance policy against hate speech and any malicious edits to our maps. This morning, the label of 'New York City' on our maps was vandalized," a spokesperson for Mapbox told The Independent:

"Typically, our validation system prevents malicious edits from entering the system from any third party data source. Our AI system flags more than 70,000 map changes a day for human review. While our AI immediately flagged this, in the manual part of the review process a human error led to this incident."

Mapbox said it was still working with security researchers to investigate the incident.