Google service relied on large websites to sell ads, denies revenue

OAKLAND, Calif. - A Google service relied on many large websites to sell and display ads was down for about three hours Thursday, denying major news publishers revenue during the crucial holiday period, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Google has restored ad serving for affected users after the issue with Google Ad Manager has been resolved and ad serving has been fixed, according to a tweet on Thursday evening. We apologize for the inconvenience. One of the sources said news websites such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times were affected by the issue.

This is real economic loss, the source said.

Google has reimbursed clients for certain service issues in the past. Thursday's outage was internally deemed a P 0 incident, its highest priority for problems, and some service resumed after about two hours, a third source said.

Ad Manager has a 90% stake in the U.S. market for ad-serving software, which publishers embed on their websites, according to an ongoing antitrust lawsuit Texas and other states are pursuing against the tech giant.

Essentially, every major website uses GAM including, e.g. The lawsuit states that USA Today, ESPN, CBS, Time, Walmart, and Weather.com are among the plaintiffs.

The lack of competition has left publishers with few back-up options to Google Ad Manager, and lawmakers in the U.S. and elsewhere are trying to curb Google's market power, according to the sources.

Google denies any allegations about anticompetitive practices, which is a fact that it faces a lot of competition.

Ads on Google's own services, such as YouTube, continued to appear during the outage.