This morning Google's DoubleClick's ad servers mysteriously went down, causing a massive ad outage across the web. DoubleClick is arguably one of the backbones of the internet's ad infrastructure: it serves a massive percentage of the web's ads (including many of those of Popular Mechanics and Hearst), and it's also the biggest ad exchange for advertisers and publishers. You'll notice that most banner ads are gone from your regular browsing, replaced by blank boxes. You may find that many sites are also simply unable to load, as ads are unable to be served.

When users attempted to log into the ad server to preview ads, the system prompted with a CAPTCHA, as the ad server was misidentifying valid users as suspicious. DoubleClick was acquired by Google in 2007 for $3.1 billion, and it's the biggest online ad exchange. It also controls the major ad auction system, AdX, which serves as a way for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads.

Update: Ad serving appears to have resumed normally. DoubleClick posted an update on its blog about the global impact of a software bug:

DoubleClick for Publishers experienced an outage this morning impacting publishers globally, across their video, display, native and mobile formats. Our team has worked quickly to fix the software bug and it's now back up and running, so our publisher partners can return to funding their content.

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