Google’s ads network struck by a nearly hour-long outage overnight

Google’s DoubleClick ad network went down overnight, leaving many websites (including Google’s own) running commercial free for nearly an hour.

Reports of the outage first surfaced on Google’s official DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) help forum, with users complaining about ads not displaying at 1.41AM AEDT.

By 12.32, Google’s vice president for display and video advertising products, Neal Mohan, took to Twitter to claim it was the first advertising outage in many years:

1/2 – Tks for all the emails. First global DFP outage in many, many years. Our large engineering team jumped on it as soon as we found out.

— Neal Mohan (@nealmohan) November 12, 2014

At 12.33PM, Mohan issued a second tweet, crediting Google’s engineers for fixing the issue in less than two hours:

2/2 – Engineers had it back up in <2 hours. Now finding cause and making sure it doesn’t happen again. Sorry to all our partners.

— Neal Mohan (@nealmohan) November 12, 2014

Google later acknowledged the outage on its official DoubleClick Publishers blog, without explaining what had caused the outage.

In 2009, Google’s Gmail service suffered a string of outages in Italy, Germany, France and several countries across Asia including Taiwan.