Broken colors or black background with OpenLayers Plugin in QGIS

Question

Approximately last few months I am experiencing problems with OpenLayers plugin in QGIS - especially with OpenStreetMap data.

The layer loads sometimes terribly slowly although the connection is quick enough. Sometimes during map panning I get damaged colors or black background.

I had similar issues both at work (latest 2.18 LTR, 64bit Windows 7) and at home (latest 2.18 LTR, 64bit Kubuntu linux).

Is there any issue in OpenLayers plugin or it is just caused by increased traffic on OSM servers which are temporarily overloaded?

Answer 1

I just experienced something similar and found an old answer here. My QGIS had issues communicating through our company's proxy. (Which I could have known in advance, but sometimes you just don't think about stuff like that.)

Google Maps remained in a constant state of loading, while OpenStreetMap data appeared as random pixels. After going to Settings>Options>Network and making sure that the proxy was correctly initialized I can now successfully load OSM data.

Unfortunately, I doubt that this will be the solution in your case, since you've experienced this both at work and at home. Still leaving this here, in case someone else stumbles upon this, like I did.