StatusCake

Google Ads outage affects users across Europe

google ads down

If there’s one thing that Google doesn’t want to happen, it’s Google Ads going down and unfortunately for them, that is exactly what happened on March 24th 2021. The worst part is, the outage didn’t merely last a few seconds or minutes, Google Ads was down for hours in Europe.

So which Google platforms stopped working?

Being so vast isn’t always a good thing which is exactly what Google learned when not only their Ads platform went down but also their website performance reporting platform, Google Analytics went down too. All across Europe, customers were unable to access their ads, report on their website stats, or see search ads. 

Google’s customers’ responses

As you can imagine, thousands of unhappy people took to Twitter to complain to Google, especially since their ads being down would have a direct impact on their conversions and sales. 

The proof? Stretch Digital did the calculations for us and reported that the Google outage would be costing $280,000 per minute in ad revenue. Wow. It’s not a surprising number considering that according to VentureBeat, “Between ads on its own site and ads on its network, Google delivers an astounding 29.8 billion ad impressions every single day”.

Google’s response 

Google wasn’t quick to reply to their customers with answers, mainly it seems because they couldn’t work out what had caused the outage in the first place. Later, they reported that they had experienced a “45-minute outage” because of “an internal storage quota issue”.

More than just website downtime

Statista reported that in 2020, Google’s ad revenue amounted to 146.92 billion dollars proving it’s a massive revenue-driver for the tech giant. Outages and downtime, however, don’t just affect revenue, they affect customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall engagement and use of a product or service. 

The solution?

You’ve probably guessed it but the solution really is StatusCake’s uptime monitoring. We alert you as soon as your website goes down in any of your chosen locations so you don’t have to find out through angry customers on Twitter! Take a free trial and see how we can maximise your website performance to ensure you don’t suffer as Google did. 

Share this

More from StatusCake

AI Didn’t Kill the SDLC. It Made It Harder to See

10 min read Whilst AI has compressed the visible stages of software delivery; requirements, validation, review and release discipline have not disappeared. They have been pushed into automation, runtime and governance. The real risk is not that the lifecycle is dead, but that organisations start acting as if accountability died with it. There is a now-familiar story about

When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering

4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,

Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)

5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t

Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)

6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff

Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)

5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything

Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System

3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting

Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?

Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021

*By providing your email address, you agree to our privacy policy and to receive marketing communications from StatusCake.