• by Kate Kaye , July 27, 2004

The Web seemed a bit less cluttered Tuesday when Web ad serving behemoth DoubleClick's system was down for the bulk of the East Coast work day. In a statement made by a DoubleClick spokesperson and relayed to the company's ad serving clients, the firm blamed its inability to serve Web ads on a "Denial of Service" attack from outside sources.

"The attack caused severe service disruption for many of our ad serving customers," noted the spokesperson, who said the problem occurred around 10 a.m. yesterday morning. "The situation has improved over the last few hours and we continue to take steps to resolve the situation permanently." In addition to the ad serving glitch, DoubleClick's Web site was down until around 3:45 p.m. Eastern time yesterday as well.

Earlier in the day, DoubleClick's publisher and advertiser customers were notified via e-mail that site users may experience ad delivery failures as a result of the problem which the firm's engineering team was working to resolve. According to the missive, the situation was "causing access issues" to both DoubleClick's user interfaces and ad servers."

At 4:45 yesterday afternoon, slots normally filled with leaderboards and other large ad units on Nasdaq.com, a DoubleClick ad serving client, were left abnormally blank. Other ad spots on the site, ironically including one on a page dedicated to Advertising Opportunities on Nasdaq.com, displayed a broken image icon and the term, "Action Cancelled." Similar ad disruptions were evident on sites run by other DoubleClick ad serving clients including CondeNet's Epicurious.com, Concierge.com, and Style.com; and Dow Jones and Company's Wall Street Journal Online.

"No advertisers have called to complain," regarding the ad server strike, said a Dow Jones spokesperson after checking with the firm's ad sales department.

Web users may not fret about a temporary discontinuation of ad service. However, not only are advertisers affected by a situation such as this because their ads aren't running as scheduled; publishers, too can incur unexpected costs as a result, having to make good on ad impressions missed due to the technical problem.

All DoubleClick ad serving clients were affected by the attack, according to a DoubleClick spokesperson, who said that the disruption took place after the system was overloaded with false ad impression requests. DoubleClick experienced a similar ad delivery suspension in August of 2000 when a server code bug halted 50 to 70 percent of ads scheduled to run for about an hour and a half, according to reports.