Commission Junction Probing Outage

Online advertising firm Commission Junction Service said third-party hosting glitches contributed to an outage Tuesday that left some of its thousands of users in the lurch for a few hours.

A spokesperson at the Santa Barbara, Calif., company said the outage, which didn’t affect all its users and was intermittent throughout, lasted from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. PT, with full service restored at that time.

According to Jeff Pullen, executive vice president of operations at parent company ValueClick, the outage was caused by technical problems at its data center.

“We have a third-party hosting center, and they were experiencing some
difficulties” Tuesday morning, he said. “But that’s been resolved now.”

Commission Junction counts Yahoo! , eBay , Best Buy , IBM and Dell among its prominent advertisers who market their products through Commission Junction.

The company said it is currently assessing the impact of the outage and will report the findings to members when the investigation is concluded. A spokesperson said more information about the outage can be found at the user’s account manager user interface.

Members at affiliate marketing forum ABestWeb say the outage translated to
blank spots on their Web sites where Connection Junction-sponsored ad
banners should have been, as well as broken hyperlinks; many members were
unable to log into the company’s Web site at CJ.com. Some members, however,
reported no outage problems and service was largely restored by 1:50 p.m.,
according to forum members.

Commission Junction matches advertisers with Web site publishers, who are
paid a commission for every sale brought in from their site. Pullen said
the company has 1,500 advertisers and the number of publishers range in the
tens of thousands at any given time.