If you were unable to access your favorite website this morning, you weren t alone. The culprit? A Google software bug.
Google s DoubleClick for Publishers tool, which serves ads that appear on websites, went down about 6 a.m. PST. Google confirmed to SiliconBeat that the outage lasted about two hours, during which websites of publications such as the Mercury News, USA Today, BBC, the Wall Street Journal and plenty of others wouldn t load. Websites that did load did so slowly. Some sites reportedly removed ads from their pages so they would load, which surely means lost revenue.
No ads on websites? That drew some excitement on Twitter, where the hashtag #dfpocalypse was trending this morning:
Being a prepper and working in technology I was not prepared for
So happy that this hashtag exists: Enjoy your ad-free websites, Internet!
— Shayna Meliker (@ShaynaMeliker)
DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) accounts for 44 percent of the ad-serving market, according to CNBC, which points out that the same tool went down for several hours last year.
Here is Google s emailed statement about today s server failure: DoubleClick for Publishers experienced an outage this morning impacting publishers globally, across their video, display, native and mobile formats. Our team has worked quickly to fix the software bug and DFP is now back up and running, so our publisher partners can return to funding their content.
Photo: AFP/Getty Images archives
