Yesterday, at around 10am EST, the ability to write new reviews for Google local results in Google Search or Google Maps stopped working. In fact, it stopped working for about four hours. Many webmasters, SEOs, local folks and others started to panic.
Google was alerted to the issue pretty quickly and they resolved it relatively quickly as well. I mean, I have no clue how many reviews are left on Google local results in four hours. So I have no idea what potential number of reviews were lost but that is more of a Google issue than a local business issue.
In any event, Google fixed the issue at around 2pm EST and everyone calmed down since.
In short, the write a review button simply did not work. You could click it all you want, nothing happened.
Here are Google's official tweets on it:
Hi all, We were able to get this fixed and you should be able to write reviews now. Thanks to everyone who reported!
— Google My Business (@GoogleMyBiz) August 16, 2017
Lesia S. a Google Maps & Earth Community Manager said in the Google Maps Forums "The issue should be fixed now. Please let us know if you are still experiencing problems with posting reviews."
Forum discussion at Google Maps Forums and Twitter.