Glitches hit DoubleClick

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Glitches hit DoubleClick August 18, 2000 by Ryan Tate

Internet advertising giant DoubleClick (DCLK) was hit with technical glitches today that cut its ad flow by about 80 percent, disrupting the delivery of banner and other online promotions across the U.S.

DoubleClick's servers delivered ads slowly or not at all throughout the afternoon, adding a sluggish feel to many sites. Some Web surfers found that the Web pages they were viewing were abruptly replaced in their browser with an error message linked to a DoubleClick Web address.

The problem began around 12:30 p.m. PT.

DoubleClick spokeswoman Gia Rokeach said the problems were "intermittent" and "minor."

But in an email to customers, DoubleClick Vice President of operations Bob Linsky said the company lost about 80 percent of its "delivery capacity" during the outage. Linksy said the company had to program and install a software patch to fix an unspecified problem "that was cascading through our ad servers."

Room for improvement Linksy added that DoubleClick could have done a better job watching for vulnerabilities and weaknesses in its ad serving system. "We clearly have room for improvement and we will be taking immediate action to review our system architecture and emergency response procedures," he wrote.

The problem was fixed at about 2:30 p.m. PT. The spokeswoman said she could not give any specific information about the problem itself.

DoubleClick is the dominant online ad agency. The company's stock has been squeezed by worries of a fall-off in Internet advertising, and by news that one big client, CMGI's (CMGI) AltaVista, dumped the firm earlier this month and pulled ad sales in-house.

http://www.upside.com/News/399dbfab0.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 20, 2000


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