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Google Advertisement Training Exercise Accidentally Costs Company $10 Million

posted by martyb on Saturday December 08 2018, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-much-for-a-green-ad? dept.

takyon writes:

Google trainee puts up dummy advert by mistake

A Google training exercise that went wrong meant a dummy advert was placed on a "huge number" of webpages and apps, the Financial Times has reported. The mistake meant a blank yellow rectangle was active on the sites and apps for about 45 minutes on 4 December, it said. The ad was only visible to people in the US and Australia.

The mistake happened when trainees were being shown how to use Google's in-house ad placing system.

[...] The advert was placed at a far higher rate of return than any other ad and was routed through several third-party exchanges, so it reached a wide audience. [...] [Google] added that it would "honour" any payments to publishers which they incurred as a result of the mistake.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday December 09 2018, @12:15PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Sunday December 09 2018, @12:15PM (#771895)

    What kinda of muppets have training sessions in a live environment? I would blame the idiots in charge for that one and not the trainee for that mistake. No mention of if he/she was fired or not, or if the trainee period is just terminated afterwards ...

    Google said it would put controls in place to prevent the mistake being repeated.

    Better late then never ...

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  • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday December 10 2018, @07:36PM

    by Common Joe (33) <common.joe.0101NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday December 10 2018, @07:36PM (#772503) Journal

    Everyone has a testing environment. Some people are just lucky enough to have a separate production environment, too.

    I didn't come up with the quote, but I like to say it (when appropriate).

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:58AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:58AM (#772799) Homepage

    It's pretty normal to train against prod. This isn't about developers, but (internal) users.

    For example, when training new employees to use HR software, do they normally train against a test environment? I imagine they use the prod environment with some test accounts/flags set, to say nothing of the HR software provider probably doesn't provide the source code to host a private test instance.

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