• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 12, 2014

A DoubleClick for Publishers outage prompted a lack of ads serving across many publisher sites Wednesday morning. Google's ad-serving platform, used by many sites across the Web, went dark. Reports ranged from ads appearing blank to Web sites not loading.

While it's not yet clear exactly how much of a financial hit the outage amounted to, Brian O'Kelley, co-founder and CEO of AppNexus, gave Business Insider an estimate of $1 million per hour in lost ad revenue.

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

The ad server went dark around 9 a.m. EST and resumed about 10:45 a.m. EST, giving Web searchers and information gatherers a breather from advertisements. Forbes, along with other publisher sites known for serving full-page ads before entering the main home page, are up and running again.