File this one under woops. From Gizmodo:
A Nicaraguan military commander recently invaded Costa Rican territory, and ordered troops to take down a Costa Rican flag and replace it with Nicaragua’s. Was this the work of a brash commander, going rogue on his superiors? A new policy of Nicaraguan imperialism? Neither. The incident was caused by an error in Google Maps.
SearchEngineLand translates the details from La Nación, Costa Rica’s largest newspaper, which reported that commander Eden Pastora blamed the incursion on a misleading border on Google Maps that was off by some 3000 meters.
La Nación points to a disparity between the borders on Bing and Google. We’ve highlighted the area in question:
This could have been a really bad fail.