At CheckM8, an Ad Server Outage

Ad management firm CheckM8’s servers went down over the weekend, causing an ad serving outage for online publishers who use the company’s platform. The downtime was apparently the result of domain registration issues.

A source at one publisher that experienced outages said the company had failed to renew its domain registration, but CheckM8 attributed the downtime to an error that occurred during upgrades over the weekend.

“Due to an error at the third party that manages the CheckM8 domain servers, a mistake [occurred] in our domain registration,” Oren Netzer, director of business development at CheckM8, told ClickZ News. “The problem was quickly identified and we contacted the third party immediately to correct the domain registration.”

ClickZ’s publisher source, who asked not to be identified, said his site lost hundreds of thousands of impressions, and a larger publishing group it belongs to lost millions of impressions over a 36-hour period during which time service was down. That company is considering discontinuing its relationship with CheckM8. “This weekend, our sites were not opening,” he said. “Any page that had an ad from CheckM8 was crippled.”

Once the problem was identified, the source said his company was able to reach reps at CheckM8 and the issue was promptly addressed.

CheckM8 declined to comment directly on how many total ad calls failed to load during the outage. “A marginal percentage in terms of overall delivery,” Netzer said. “The problem was completely resolved within 15 minutes.” He said the longer outage cited by its publisher client was owed to the sometimes long process of domain propagation.

The ad management firm boasts recent client wins and said it’s constantly adding service improvements. “We have recently added a few very large publishers in excess of one billion impressions a month in the U.S., Europe, and Japan and will exceed a total of ten billion impressions this month,” said Netzer.