Global Google ad outages potentially cause millions of dollars in losses

[Justin Kahn]

Google’s ad service is an important part of the infrastructure of the internet. Many of the best and most trusted news outlets, entertainment sites and others rely on it in order to monetize content. This morning part of Google’s ad service, known as Doubleclick, was knocked out of commission for a couple of hours resulting in potentially the loss of millions of dollars for Google and publishers worldwide. If you noticed a brief TechSpot downtime, this was it, though we turned off ads as soon as we noticed.

Now up and running, the outage affected Doubleclick publishers for about two hours this morning until around 10:45am when Google fixed the software bug. According to the company, publishers from all over the world were hit across all formats including video, display, native and mobile. Reports suggest the outage is also hitting YouTube ads and Google’s Adsense platform, but there are no particular details on the extent of the downtime.

While some on Twitter encouraged users to enjoy the ad free experience, many of these services rely almost entirely on Google ads and likely wouldn’t exist without something to replace them. Thousands of others, like TechSpot, rely on Google's Doubleclick for ad serving so when the glitch occured it appeared like the sites were down or timing out.

As of now it looks as though Google has taken care of this rare hiccup, with ads now being served as usual.

Image via Shutterstock

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https://www.techspot.com/news/58804-google-ad-outages-cause-millions-dollars.html

 

[cliffordcooley]

I didn't loose a penny!

I almost wish I could say the Internet was a better place, but I didn't witness the outage.

 

[tonylukac]

That's who does it. Almost want to get an iphone and ditch android. God struck them down for serving up all those viruses and adware. It's run like a farse in that no one makes enough money on ads alone like television stations do.

 

[Guest]

Google isn't the reason you see ads, they just own one of the best ad serving platforms. The reason you see ads is that someone has to pay the writers of content you read on a site. Someone has to pay to maintain the site, and if something breaks, someone needs to be there to fix it. Other people need to be paid to keep the site up to user expectations...note that this site is responsive, which is the standard these days.

Hundreds of thousands of people are employed because banner ads exist. Banner ads are rarely successful on their own, instead, they are one piece of a much larger marketing plan.

 

[Kibaruk]

That's who does it. Almost want to get an iphone and ditch android. God struck them down for serving up all those viruses and adware. It's run like a farse in that no one makes enough money on ads alone like television stations do.

Lol you are funny.

I didn't loose a penny!

I almost wish I could say the Internet was a better place, but I didn't witness the outage.

Me neither, had no idea until I read this.

What I don't get, is why the site depends on google's adsense it should load the site then googles service, it makes sense?

 

[MikeAcker]

They want us to cry about this ?

what did hackers cost us recently ? or price collusion on the money exchange in the banking system?

so it cost the merchants some dough . rats to them. it's trivial compared to the corruption and sloppy work them bums foist on the public every minute

 

[Uncle Al]

Awwwwww ..... those poor advertisers, I'll bet each of them is going to have to step down to the gold Rolex now ..... poor, poor advertisers ......