Google's DoubleClick ads division hit with hours-long service disruptions

Google's DoubleClick has been experiencing service disruptions since at least Tuesday morning, creating a headache -- and potentially major losses in revenue -- for marketers and publishers that use the publishing and revenue management service.

Per the Google Ads service dashboard, Google has been aware of of a problem with DoubleClick Search, affecting a majority of users, since 8 a.m.

"The affected users are able to access DoubleClick Search, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior," the dashboard message said.

Google said it has tried to mitigate the fact that a number of search ad clicks are not being redirected to landing pages properly. DoubleClick Search engineering teams turned off the DoubleClick Search redirect for potentially impacted users.

"While your ads will keep serving, this change will stop all conversion tracking for these clicks until a resolution is in place and we revert the change," the dashboard says. "As a result, you may observe a decrease in conversions reported. We have also proactively paused your bid strategies to prevent any automated bid changes, and they will not resume until we have fixed the issue."

Meanwhile, at 10:07 a.m., Google noted it was also investigating reports of an issue with DoubleClick for Publishers. "The affected users are able to access DoubleClick for Publishers, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior," the dashboard says. It latest update, at 2:48 pm, noted that "Tracking signals are sometimes returning HTTP errors in multiple regions."

By 7:30 p.m., DoubleClick noted its problems were resolved.

The problem with DoubleClick Search should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.Due to a bug in DoubleClick, we were unable to track and record some ad impressions, clicks and conversions for a period of time on March 13th (EDT). Some redirects also did not work as intended. For customers who link their DoubleClick and Google Analytics (or Google Analytics 360) accounts, impacted events may not have been recorded. To mitigate the issue, we briefly paused conversion tracking and automated bidding on DoubleClick Search, and some bidding on DoubleClick Bid Manager. We have fixed the bug and will continue to monitor over the coming days.