A quick search for companies like Virgin Airlines and a bit of glare lead us to click on one of the two ads at the top of the page rather than an organic search result. What happened? Google’s famous ‘not-quite-a-404-error-but-your-page-is-not-there’ screen. A few more quick searches, looking up DirectBuy, Hotwire, and a couple other household names yielded the same strange result. The server that manipulates, publishes and tracks the ads which make Google (and myriad Web based ad agencies and their clients millions of dollars a day) is down. Like it’s not working. And that’s a problem.

According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Google pulled in 29.321 billion in 2010, which averages out to about $80 million a day. As of this writing, the advertising web servers were down from 11:13 Eastern until about 12:11 am Thursday morning —  you do the math.

So how did we know it was really down and it’s not just our computers, Internet connection or something unique to us? We checked on the world-renowned website, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/and what we got back was the flagship image of this post.

Reasons? This might be due to Google’s roll out of their new +1 service, where users can rank ads they find useful. It might also be hacking, which huge companies like Epsilon have recently suffered. It’s hard to believe Google’s ad tracking server would be hacked though, especially when grabbing user records is so much more lucrative. Maybe, just maybe, someone forgot to renew the domain license for www.googleadservices.com. It did happen to Hotmail once.

*updated at 00:30, Eastern Time