Google AdSense suffers massive global outage

Google AdSense has suffered a massive global outage as many publishers have accused that their account is not updated with the metrics like clicks, impression, earnings, and page views. This comes on the heels of the company’s slowing advertising revenue for the first quarter of 2019.

The publishers were reporting outage since late Tuesday as they were unable to find clicks from visitors and page views in their dashboard for publishers despite ads still appearing on the sites. There appeared to be no information from Google with regard to the issue on Wednesday.

The issue was found on both the site and mobile app. On Thursday, Google has confirmed the delay with the Google Ads platform and will be actively working on resolving the issue. However, publishers remained concerned that the data may be lost during the period of outage.

Google’s advertising revenues have contributed immensely to the Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) as 85% of revenue came from advertising last year. In the past two years, Google has been able to grow ad revenues. During the first quarter of 2019, Google’s ad revenues improved by 15% to $30.7 billion.

However, the ad revenues decreased sequentially by $1.9 billion which impacted the top line. This is the first time since the first quarter of 2018 the search giant is reporting a sequential decrease in ad revenues. In contrast, Google has been focusing on improving the non-ad revenue part of the business for bringing in stable revenue in the long-term.

The first quarter earnings took a hit due to hefty antitrust fine in the European Union. In less than a year after being slapped a massive penalty by Brussels for misusing its Android operating system, Google is facing a fresh fine of $1.7 billion for breaching the competition laws pertaining to online advertising. Two years ago, European regulators had handed a $2.7-billion fine after Google was found to have favored its shopping service over rivals.

The European Commission believed that Google imposed restrictions on publishers who use its AdSense advertising platform, through exclusivity contracts, thereby stopping the display of ads brokered by its rivals. By tweaking certain clauses pertaining to ad publishing several years ago, the company allegedly tried to monopolize the online advertising market.

Browse through our earnings calendar and get all scheduled earnings announcements, analyst/investor conference and much more!