Hey,
Let me help you out. I have got good understanding of Google APIs. It seemed to be a latency issue which was introduced recently. Nothing to worry, there could be multiple reasons like change in the API as you mentioned or the API is returning huge data which takes lot of processing time. I have worked on the similar projects in the past on the same lines like, page load optimization, API query optimization etc. Ping me you if you are interested.
Thanks,
Vijay Muvva