I keep saying this — it’s not a glitch. Niantic’s servers were hit hard by the unprecedented demand for this game, and calculating the distance to nearby pokemon was one of the expensive processes. They turned it off to save bandwidth and processor time, to keep their server farms from bursting into flame.

According to some dataminers, the steps were disabled on purpose. I would assume it was to help with game stability or server stability until they can find a way to stabilize it.