How Google Made Millions Of People Lose Money
This article is more than 2 years old
A substantial number of websites took a major financial hit on Thursday night thanks to Google Ads. The tech giant’s ad platform went down for over two and a half hours on Thursday evening. The outage caused websites that utilize the service to miss out on any potential accrued revenue during that time.
It is estimated that the outage caused millions to miss out on Google ads-related sales. Inventory exchanges and automated buying were both directly impacted, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. Simply put, users could not execute income-generating functions.
Other reported issues included “error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior,” and just a general inability for website visitors to view ads, according to Google. Exact losses have not been made public, however, it is clear that websites of any size that make money from Google Ads suffered in some fiscal way.
Paul Bannister, who works as chief strategy officer at CMI Marketing Inc.’s CafeMedia, shed some light on just how far-reaching this Google Ads outage was. “We and all the publishers we work with are getting no ad revenue. Literally every company we know has been affected,” emphasized Bannister.
Google was reportedly quick to respond to its Ads platform issue. In a statement made public via a Twitter tweet, the company communicated that they were investigating what brought upon the issue. The issue reportedly began at exactly 8:04 PM Eastern Standard Time and was ultimately resolved by 10:40 PM Eastern Standard Time on Thursday evening.
Despite the Google Ads issue being seemingly rectified it still remains in question exactly what caused the outage to occur. Google has also yet to release any updates regarding the internal investigation they are conducting related to the issue. And it is unclear if they ever intend to.
Regardless of whether or not Google ever releases an update revealing why its Ads platform went down for a period of time, the fact that it suffered an outage at all is unsettling. Many businesses rely on the service to generate the income needed to keep their websites afloat. Should an outage occur again the impacts could be far more detrimental, especially for those smaller websites that rely on the service far more than larger ones.
Meanwhile, in lighter news unrelated to the Google Ads outage, the tech giant recently announced the merger of the popular navigation app Waze and its Google Maps teams. Google has owned Waze since 2013 but has kept it separate from its proprietary Maps software.
Now, Google wants to integrate Waze’s unique functions into its overall geo apps portfolio which includes Google Earth and Street View. “By bringing the Waze team into Geo’s portfolio of real-world mapping products, the teams will benefit from further increased technical collaboration,” Google relayed in a statement. However, the company has also made it clear that they have no intention of fully absorbing Waze and dissolving it as an app. Waze will remain its own app despite the integration.
