A typical topic of discussion I will see in the forums related to AdSense is that the "stats are stuck."
Stats are stuck in the AdSense community means that the earning reports have stalled and are either not updating or slowly updating.
But when there is a real outage, publishers go nuts. I don't blame them, they make their money day to day from people clicking on their ads. And with all that smart pricing and AdSense banning going around, when a hiccup happens in the system, the publisher wonders if it is only them or others.
So when there is an issue, they flock to the forums and complain.
Always, always, I get tweets, emails and so forth from really concerned publishers if this is a wide spread issue. It almost always is.
This time, Google posted the issue in the known issues area, and it is resolved by now. But they wrote:
We've experienced a temporary reporting outage in AdSense accounts. Our engineers have been working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Sorry for any alarm caused, and thanks for your patience.
There is a lot of discussion around this outage but I think everyone has calmed down.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.