A Google Ad Manager outage reportedly crippled ad delivery on several major websites last week. According to two sources familiar with the matter, the outage impacted the revenue of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and many other publications.
Google’s advertising service went under sometime in the evening on Thursday. A few minutes past 8 PM EST, Google Ad Manager’s status update pageOpens a new window said it was “investigating an issue affecting ad serving,†which lasted for more than 150 minutes.
“This is real economic loss,†the two sources told Reuters, considering the holiday season. One large news website reportedly lost thousands of dollars an hour in revenue. Google itself relies on Ad Manager, AdSense and AdMob-based advertising on websites, mobile apps, games or videos for most of its revenue.
While the scope of the outage remains under wraps, sources told Reuters that the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times were among those that were impacted. Users could access the portal but reportedly saw error messages, high latency, and other unexpected behavior.
Google Ad Manager is down during one of the highest ad spend times of the year. Probably close to 80% of open web ads are down. Pretty unbelievable stuff and truly unfortunate for publishers. Have to wonder what the revenue impact is globally.
— Kyle Ivins (@KyleIvins) December 9, 2022Opens a new window
The ad-serving service was restored approximately two-and-a-half hours later at 10:40 PM EST, but not before requiring Google to designate it internally as a “PO,†its highest priority one, according to a source.
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