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.

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