Thor Schrock

It has been conformed officially by Google that the referral buttons for the FireFox browser and the Google Pack are not being displayed as they should on thousands of sites across the Internet.

I noticed a significant drop in my earnings beginning a couple days ago. When my referral conversion and impressions both reached 0 for over 36 hours, I started poking around. I found that the buttons were not showing on my sites either.

After you have breathed a sigh of relief that you have not been banned for some reason, the next question is what is wrong and when will the revenue generating gems be back online.

Jordon, an AdSense Pro who appears to work for Google, posted in the AdSense Google Group:

To those of you who are having trouble seeing referral units, what
browser and OS are you using? I heard that this issue is mainly
affecting users of Internet Explorer 7. Is anyone having trouble when
viewing the ads in other browsers?

Our engineers are working as quickly as they can to resolve this.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

Since that post it has been confirmed that the outage is across browsers (IE, FireFox, and Opera) and across operating systems (Windows, OSX, Linux). The problem is definately on Google's end, but non of the brain trusts at G seem to know what when wrong.

When was the last time Google had an outage like this? Imagine if this would have happened to their ad blocks. If Google was the one losing thousands in revenue every second, something tells me the problem would be fixed already.

**Update 8:25 PM CST** My pages have started showing the referral buttons again, but I am still not seeing any income activity. Google AdSense has a scheduled maintenance update tomorrow morning at 10 AM CST. Hopefully they plan on making some additional corrections.