Massive Outage Impacts Advertising, Publishing - What We Know

A massive information technology glitch impacted Microsoft cloud-computing services early Friday, with cybersecurity company CrowdStrike reporting the outages as a result of one of its routine software updates gone wrong - "not a security incident or cyberattack."

“Earlier today, a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally," a Microsoft spokesperson told MediaDailyNews. "We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.” 

Microsoft announced Friday morning that its 365 apps and services have recovered, but some individual customers but may still be impacted.

While the glitch took down operations for many airlines, hospitals, transit systems, it also took down or slowed some websites, publishing services, and apps used by advertisers and developers.

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Janel Laravie, founder and CEO of Chacka Marketing, said “the only impact to advertising is there could be lower volumes of ads served because of accessibility issues due to fewer impressions served, but we might not know if that occurred until we run reports tomorrow. If fewer people can access the internet or websites, less inventory is required.”

Laravie also said she personally was not impacted so far today, and been using Microsoft Teams for a good portion of the morning.

“I can’t believe my computer is working,” she said. “It's fine in my little corner of the world.”

Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said he has stopped using CrowdStrike software after the outage. “We just deleted CrowdStrike from all our systems, so no rollouts at all,” Musk wrote in a post on X. 

CrowdStrike, which provides cybersecurity services and software for many large corporations using Microsoft systems, issued a software update to automatically fix systems, but it seemed to have only fixed some computers. Others, the company said, may need to be manually patched and restarted. 

"The recent CrowdStrike outage caused a significant issue with Microsoft Azure, driving widespread disruption across many apps relying on Azure," Adam Smart, director of product and gaming at AppsFlyer, wrote in an email to MediaDailyNews. "While we’ve seen impacts across so many industries, this outage came with significant implications for mobile marketers and their user acquisition campaigns. When apps go down, the user experience takes a direct hit, tarnishing the app's reputation and often leading to user abandonment."

Smart explained in the email that each minute an app is down translates to lost revenue, user churn, and wasted advertising spend. He did not provide an among of revenue lost per minute, but called it "insane," especially in gaming.

AppsFlyer, for example, works with gaming app developers and publishers that spend more than $1 million per day in user acquisition. If their app is down for half the day due to an outage, they are unlikely to recover or gain benefits from that $500,000 investment. 

George Kurtz, president and CEO of CrowdStrike, told NBC News that the problem could persist for some time.

In recent days, all types of glitches from companies have occurred. The most notable for the advertising and ecommerce industry occurred with Amazon, which temporarily had to shut down its systems when its advertising portal crashed Tuesday night, temporarily disrupting the company's Prime Day sales event. It also disrupted the ability for media buyers to log in to the platform.

Despite the slight setback during the first day, Adobe Analytics data estimates consumers spent $14.2 billion during the two-day sale -- up 11.0% year-over-year (YoY), setting a new record for Prime Day. 

Mobile devices drove 49.2% of online purchases versus desktop shopping. Over both days, $7 billion was spent through mobile devices -- up 18.6% YoY.  

“Companies will always be limited in what they can do, it's not their infrastructure to upgrade or maintain - just like when anything goes down, get creative and consider all your options,” said Elizabeth Marsten, vice president of innovation and growth of commerce media at agency Tinuiti, in reference to the Amazon outage. “In our case, because we had an API connection via Skai as a campaign management platform, we were able to push changes through. I debate on how much even Amazon can do as well - even with all the computing power they have, the demand is astronomical, especially when crammed into a two-day period.”

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