Google Ad Manager knocked offline for more than three hours

On Thursday night last week, Google Ad Manager went down for more than three hours probably leading to thousands of pounds in losses for businesses that use the platform to profit from ad revenue.

During the outage, users could access their Google Ad Manager dashboard but could not list available ad inventory or even sell advertising space to third-party buyers.

Users also reported slow responses from the platform and other errors. Only a mere 10% of businesses in the US don’t rely on Google Ad Manager for online advertising and an outage like this if not promptly resolved could have adverse effects on a lot of businesses.

According to Reuters, the outage was classified as a ‘PO’ event which is an internal code for most critical problems. Users will be happy that services were restored before the issue escalated further but will still be looking to know whether the underlying cause has been resolved or it’s a temporary measure.

There was a big period gap between discovering the problem and resolving it which could point to a deeper underlying issue. The report from Google after services were restored did not provide any context into what caused the issue.

It’s also hard to establish how many businesses were affected and how much ad revenue was lost but reports suggest that the problem affected users in the USA and also Japan.

However, looking on the other side of things, this could also turn out to be another Adidas case for some businesses. In 2017, the clothing giant could not access its Google Ad Manager for two days meaning it could not invest in paid traffic. Surprisingly, neither its traffic nor revenue was adversely affected.

They also had another outage that lasted a week, but again their revenue did not drop significantly leading the company to re-evaluate their investment into paid advertising.

Still, Google Ad Manager continues to be an invaluable tool for a lot of businesses and the tech giant will do well to ensure that there are no significant outages like the one experienced.