Google’s post-cookie ad tech glitch—recent issue raises industry questions

Early testers of Google’s Privacy Sandbox are figuring out how to navigate the latest issues around the cookie demise following a recent outage that cut the flow of advertising through the platform. Last week, Google’s experimental ad platform suffered a glitch that disabled application programming interfaces (APIs), which are at the heart of the system. Ad tech vendors on the publishing and advertising sides use these APIs to participate in ad auctions that are conducted entirely within Google’s Chrome web browser. After last week’s glitch, some publishers reported ad activity and revenue stopped flowing through Privacy Sandbox for hours. It was a minor setback that Google’s Privacy Sandbox team quickly fixed, but the fact that APIs could fail prompted questions about the possibility of future breakdowns. “It raises the bigger point, which is browsers are software and software breaks down sometimes,” said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at Raptive, a publishing collective that is testing Privacy Sandbox. “Here if there is a problem, and Sandbox goes down for any reason, is there any recourse?” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Last week, Bannister posted to LinkedIn reporting the glitch, saying it lasted about 16 hours. Since the platform is only in the testing phase the disruption to business was minor. However, if Privacy Sandbox APIs are widely adopted and account for a larger share of revenue for publishers, an outage would be a bigger deal. “Having the entire system unavailable for a big chunk of a day could be catastrophic for many publishers and advertisers,” Bannister wrote. “It will be interesting to see how Chrome and the Sandbox team can provide comfort that this can’t happen. But I’m not sure it’s possible. Systems crash.” Last week’s error was small, and Bannister estimated it only affected hundreds of dollars’ worth of ads. For its part, Google said the problem was related to how it configured the testing of Privacy Sandbox, and that same problem would not occur again once the latest testing period is over at the end of June. Google’s testing period makes it so 1% of traffic in Chrome is put into the Privacy Sandbox for publishers and advertisers to experiment with running ads through it. “The Chrome team places the highest priority on the reliability of our platform and all of the critical APIs used by major sites and services across the web, including the Privacy Sandbox technologies,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement provided to Ad Age. “We recognize the Privacy Sandbox tools will help support monetization across the web and will continue to work with industry stakeholders to ensure the best possible performance and reliability.” Delays and hiccups With Privacy Sandbox, Google is attempting to overhaul ad tech on the open web, so that publishers and advertisers don’t have to rely on third-party cookies to track consumers and target ads. Google now plans to disable third-party cookies on Chrome in mid-2025, a move meant to improve consumer privacy on its browser. Privacy Sandbox locks data into the browser, so it doesn’t leak out to third parties during ad auctions, and the market participants plug into APIs to maintain their ad functions. The change to the ad tech pipes represents a major overhaul to how publishers, advertisers and ad tech vendors do business. And Google is being watched closely for how it implements Privacy Sandbox because of the ramifications for the rest of the digital ad industry. In April, Google delayed cookie deprecation from the end of this year to mid-next year. Justin Rau, group product manager at NextRoll, an ad tech vendor, told Ad Age that the glitch just highlighted the need for more testing and that outages are not anything the ad tech industry hasn’t faced before. “Privacy Sandbox represents a significant structural change in how digital advertising operates, and such transitions are bound to encounter hiccups as they are refined and improved,” Rau said. Other ad tech specialists said that there could be ways to spread the ad responsibilities so not everything runs through Chrome in the future. For instance, Google and partners are developing “trusted execution environments,” or TEEs, which are secure computing platforms in the cloud that will handle some of the advertising functions outside of Chrome. “If you move everything onto the browser, and you make it much more complicated, what happens when it fails, who is liable for the potentially millions of dollars that don’t get spent,” said an ad tech exec from a major platform, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If you have services running on TEEs, which are ultimately operated by the ad tech companies themselves, when a server goes down, it’s their fault. But if the API within the browser goes down for any reason, it’s the browser’s fault.” Read more ad tech news from Ad Age In a report in February, IAB Tech Lab, the industry trade group, even theorized that one of the potential drawbacks to Privacy Sandbox was the uncertainty over accountability if the system goes down. “With Chrome acting as an active participant in a financial transaction (the ad auction) and delivery of goods (serving the ad), if Privacy Sandbox neglects legal and business requirements, that poses a grave concern,” IAB Tech Lab wrote in its lengthy analysis about the platform. Google responded to Tech Lab’s concerns, saying Privacy Sandbox does not dramatically change how publishers, advertisers and vendors structure deals. “Access to web APIs does not depend on accepting terms of service or otherwise entering into a contract with the maker of the user’s browser,” Google’s team said at the time. “This is critical to a functioning web: When a user navigates to a site, the site should just work, regardless of pre-existing commercial arrangements between browser and site.” “Nothing about the Privacy Sandbox requires a change to this model,” Google added. “Privacy Sandbox APIs like Protected Audience and Attribution Reporting are not services provided by one entity to another, nor are they made available subject to commercial guarantees. They are technical tools built into the browser that developers decide whether and how to use.”

Google’s post-cookie ad tech glitch—recent issue raises industry questions

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