Google Ads outage affects users across Europe

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.