WASHINGTON – Google’s ad serving platform, DoubleClick, went down for more than hour this morning forcing Web publishers, including WTOP.com, to go ad free until the problem could be fixed.
In a statement, Google says that the Internet giant was experiencing technical problems that prevented ads from populating, which prevented pages from loading properly on sites across the globe.
The ad service went down about 9 a.m., according to Business Insider, and DoubleClick tweeted about 11 a.m. that the problem had been corrected.
Our team has worked quickly to fix the software bug. It's now back up, so our publisher partners can return to funding their content.
— DoubleClick (@doubleclick) November 12, 2014
The ad service allows sites to target ads to specific readers or display the ads on specific pages of a site.
Business Insider reports that publishers could collectively could have lost $1 million an hour while DoubleClick was down. Google dominates digital advertising with as much as a 31 percent share of the market.
The lack of ads and slow-to-load pages forced many sites including WTOP.com to take down all ads so that visitors could still peruse the site as normal.