The Internet briefly looked a little different on Wednesday as ads across a number of websites vanished.
A failure at a Google ad server caused loading problems for many websites Wednesday morning, possibly costing publishers millions in missed ad revenue. The problem appears to have begun around 9 a.m. ET, but was resolved around 11:30 a.m. ET, according to Reuters report.
Websites including CNBC.com, BBC, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the Financial Times experienced slow loading times, if they would load at all.
A note from Google said the company was aware of the problem. "Our engineers are already on this and will be providing an update ASAP," the note said.
In response, some websites, including CNBC.com, removed their ads while the problems was being addressed.
This is not the first time something like this has happened. Last year, Google's DoubleClick for Publishers went down for several hours.
This year, Google will account for about 32.4 percent of the worldwide digital ad market, making it the leader in the space, according to eMarketer estimates. Google's DoubleClick Ad Serving is the dominant player when it comes to ad servers, accounting for about 44 percent of the ad serving market.
Needless to say it didn't take long after the system went down for people to take to Twitter to vent. The outage even spurred the hashtag #dfapocalypse on Twitter.
See what http://Youtube.com is like without Ads for a day #dfpocalypse