A key piece of the internet went down today resulting in a loss of millions of dollars in revenue for Google as well as hundreds of publishers, big and small, around the world. The tool is question is Doubleclick for Publishers. It is used by a large number of websites on the internet for serving ads alongside content. The outage meant that ads were no longer served on those websites thus causing loss in revenue for both publishers and Google.
In a statement issued through email, Google confirmed that Doubleclick for Publishers had suffered an outage which impacted publishers around the world across video, display, native and mobile platforms. The company did confirm that it had worked quickly to fix the bug and get things up and running again.
News of this outage spread first through social media before it was picked up by online news outlets. The first reports of the outage started appearing on Twitter as early as 9am ET.
Fortunately Google was able to fix this bug quickly. Doubleclick for Publishers is back which means ads are now being served across all platforms that publishers are using. For those who surf the web, if they wondered why ads on some of their favorite websites were missing today, it means that they’ll start seeing advertisements on those websites once again.
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