Map updates
When you start your Waze client device it will attempt to connect to the Waze servers. If it fails it will periodically retry. While disconnected you have access to cached maps and some cached routing information. The client can also do its own routing, but it does not include road speeds and the estimated times are completely wrong.
When connected Waze will, if necessary update the client map against the Live Map. If you plot a route, it will also make any map updates along the route.
Traffic notifications
Traffic notifications come to your client in real time. These include traffic speeds and accident reports. Waze may automatically generate a new route based on such traffic speed reports.
Editing the map in Cartouche
Unless you become an Area Manager you can only edit the map up to 1 mile (1.6knm) from where you have driven. Permission to edit does not happen immediately. It is usually two days after your route appears in My Dashboard
Your routes
When you travel your route is recorded and can be viewed in the My Dashboard section of the Waze website. "Your recent routes" section is labelled with the server time of the last update. It typically takes 3 days for your routes to appear. Substantially longer times may occur when Waze is dealing with more urgent problems.
New roads
If you record a new road it will first appear as a red line on your client device. It will not be visible appear in Cartouche as a new road until about the same time it appears as a recent route on My Dashboard. That is, typically about 3 days. The red line roads will disappear from your client device after a week at most.
Once a road is edited and confirmed in Cartouche, or any other changes are made, these changes are periodically transferred to the Live Map. This usually happens every 2-5 days. If Waze is having problems, this can be substantially longer. Even though the change has been made in Cartouche it will not show in the Live Map until a batch transfer is made by Waze. The Live Map shows the server date of when the last batch transfer was made from Cartouche
Even when the Live Map is updated it takes another day for the routing server to fully update to reflect the changes. So you can see new roads, and navigate to them by choosing them as a destination, but you cannot find them as a location. And routing may be poor or fail, until the routing server processes the new changes.
In summary: If you record a new road, expect to wait 3 days for it to appear on Cartouche. Expect another 5 days for it to appear on the live map and another day until you can route to it. A nine day wait is typical. It may be longer. It is still a faster updating process than any other GPS navigation device.
Points
When your client device connects to Waze it retrieves your current points from the Waze points table. As you gain points while driving, your [[client device] updates your points, and tries to send them to the Waze server. The Waze server holds these updates and adds them to the points table once a day.
If you restart Waze it will download the current points from the Waze points table again, without the updates. It will appear as though your points have been lost. New points will continue to be added. At the end of the day, the Waze server will process all the points updates and your total will be as it should.
Loss of information
There are reports of permanent losses of points and missing road updates and missing routes. Many of these are resolved by the passage of time.
There have been some genuine losses but they seems to be small and few and seem to be less common as Waze develops.