I'm not actually assuming it only happens for one town. I'd assume it would be broader than that. I don't really think it matters much how it happens, though, does it?

Even if all that happened were a widespread cellular outage, it's unlikely I'd have that region downloaded such that I could still search for whatever address I needed. Locals very well might, even accidentally in their caches, which might let us generate directions to somewhere I could get a map...though it would make it harder to look up the phone number to verify whether such a place sells maps.

It's not necessarily completely unsolvable. It's just a lot harder than it would be if other people still cared about map navigation as much as I did.

Warfare is one possibility. This might seem like a very unlikely scenario depending on where you live, but in a modern Blitzkrieg situation the government wouldn't be asking citizens to shut the lights off at night but instead interfering with GPS signals to make navigation difficult for enemy aircraft.

We know this is possible because in the last 1.5 years this has happened numerous times - people would wake up in Tel Aviv and open Google Maps and find that their GPS thinks they're in Beirut or somewhere in the desert in Jordan or in middle of the Mediterranean Sea or wherever.

You can imagine that this causes all kinds of chaos, from issues ordering a taxi in taxi apps to food delivery and just general traffic jams. The modern world is not built for lack of GPS.

I imagine this or something like it is a daily reality in Ukraine, with all the GPS jamming for missile defense.