Google trainee commits $ 10 million blunder

Google trainee commits $ 10 million blunder

During a training session on the online advertising system, a Google employee mistakenly launched an empty advertising campaign. His gesture caused a loss of several million euros.

A very expensive mistake. On December 4, a trainee committed a blunder that could prove very costly for the Californian giant. According to the Financial Times, the mistake would have occurred during a training on the company's online advertising system. The unfortunate employee would have pressed the wrong key, ordering the sending of a simple empty advertising rectangle on hundreds of thousands of web pages and applications in Australia and the United States. Balance of this clumsiness: 10 million dollars of loss for the group.

In fact, the white rectangle remained online for more than 45 minutes. To make matters worse, it was high-end advertising space that Google had sold to advertisers at prices ten times above the market average. Finding the mistake, the group immediately ended the campaign. But the damage was done, $ 10 million of advertising space was purely spoiled. This exorbitant amount, coming from an estimate of a specialist in the sector has not been confirmed by the search engine. Google nonetheless made it clear the next day that the group would "honor all payments to advertisers for each insert purchased" by advertisers should have been included.

"A simple employee can plant a whole advertising campaign"

The fault does not rest solely with the clumsy apprentice. This type of error is in principle impossible within the Californian company, where the system of sale of online advertising space is fully automated. Interviewed by Le Figaro last month, a former employee of Google denounced anonymously "the omnipotence" of Google employees and "the illusion of security." "A simple employee can plant an entire advertising campaign," he confided, even speaking of a "state in the state." Elsewhere, at Twitter, an employee had the last day off the account of US President Donald Trump. After a quick internal investigation, Twitter was able to determine where the error came from, but too late. Followed by over 41 million subscribers, Donald Trump's account had disappeared from the radar for eleven minutes. Faithful to himself, the President of the United States had not failed to react later: "My Twitter account was blocked for 11 minutes by a thug employee".