For roughly three hours on Thursday, a Google tool used by many large websites that sell and display advertising was unavailable, depriving major news publishers of cash during the vital holiday season, according to two people familiar with the situation.
Google apologised for the inconvenience and stated in a tweet on Thursday night that the problem with Google Ad Manager had been fixed and that ad serving had been resumed for the impacted users.
One of the sources claimed that news websites like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times were impacted by the problem.
Another claimed that a major news website was losing thousands of dollars an hour in income because advertisers were promoting holiday discounts at the time.
The source claimed that “this is a true economic loss.”
Requests for comments from The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Google were not immediately fulfilled.
In the past, Google has offered refunds to customers for specific service problems. According to a third source, the outage on Thursday was classified as a “P0” event, which is the company’s highest priority classification for issues. After roughly two hours, some service was partially restored.
According to an ongoing antitrust action Texas and other states have been pursuing against the tech giant, Ad Manager has nearly 90% of the U.S. market for ad-serving software that publishers embed on their websites.
The lawsuit claims that “almost every major website uses GAM” (for example, USA Today, ESPN, CBS, Time, Walmart, and Weather.com).
According to the sources, publishers have few alternatives to Google Ad Manager due to the absence of competition, and lawmakers in the US and other countries are working on legislation to limit Google’s market dominance.
Google has stated that it has a lot of competition and refutes claims of unfair business practises.
Ads continued to run on Google services like YouTube throughout the outage.
