[pearkes]

It's funny, they did give a warning of sorts.

Around a month prior to turning everything off, they started throwing in a random 403 to requests. No reasoning - just like it was being added by them to deter use.

I noticed this and just simply put in a try/catch, which "solved" the problem. Luckily I'm not building a business on it (that'd be pretty silly) so the downtime isn't the end of the world.

Here's a Stack Overflow post from during the "warning period": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11878143/google-weather-a...

Seems like it was their way of giving us a heads up.

[qwertzlcoatl]

The 403s probably were Google already shutting down the system. They have many servers performing the same functions; propagating a new version of the server software (in this case, an update with the weather API stripped) can take days, and in the mean time, it's luck of the draw whether you're on an old functioning server, or a new 403-spitting one. This is entirely by design: this way, if there's something wrong with an update, it doesn't immediately affect everyone, and they can hotfix things before it runs on all servers.