Any steps we take to increase the security, reliability and redundancy of our systems may be expensive and may not be successful in preventing system failures. We have experienced, and may in the future experience, disruptions, outages, and other performance problems due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, introductions of new functionality, human or software errors, capacity constraints due to an overwhelming number of users simultaneously accessing our solutions, distributed denial of service attacks, or other security related incidents.
If we are unable to prevent system failures, the functioning and performance of our solutions could suffer, which in turn could interrupt our business and harm our results of operations.
Operational, technical and performance issues with our platform, whether real or perceived may adversely affect our business, reputation, financial condition and operating results.
We depend upon the sustained and uninterrupted performance of our platform to provide digital marketing solutions for ad viewability, ad fraud prevention and brand safety. If our platform cannot scale to meet demand, if there are errors in our execution of any of these functions on our platform, or if we experience outages, then there may be consumer dissatisfaction, damage claims, damage to reputation, and our business may be harmed. For example, if we fail to measure campaigns that were previously paid for by advertisers or our technology interferes with the delivery of ads on websites or other proprietary platforms, we could be subject to lawsuits or requests by our customers that we make them whole, which could include costs of media (i.e., the amount such advertiser paid to websites) that outweigh the verification fees or revenues originally gathered from the customer and could result in litigation or damage to our reputation. We may also face material delays in introducing new services, products and enhancements.
Our platform is complex and multifaceted, and operational and performance issues could arise both from the platform itself and from outside factors. Errors, failures, vulnerabilities, or bugs have been found in the past, and may in the future, be found. We also rely on third-party integrations with proprietary platforms, DSPs, ad servers, publishers/websites for our products, and services to perform properly. Additionally, our platform is often used in connection with our customers’ respective technology platforms utilizing different operating systems, system management software, equipment and networking configurations, which may cause errors in, or failures of, our platform or such other computing environments. Operational and performance issues with our platform could include the failure of our user interface, outages, data delays, errors during upgrades or patches, errors due to manual data entry or processes, discrepancies in costs billed versus costs paid, unanticipated volume overwhelming our databases, server failure, or catastrophic events affecting one or more cloud environments. While we have built redundancies in our systems, full redundancies do not exist. Some failures will shut our platform down completely, others only partially, but a disrupting event could result in prolonged downtime of our operations. Partial failures, which we have experienced in the past, could result in the misapplication of exclusion and inclusion lists to campaigns or a manual error in keyword lists, resulting in misdelivery of ads, which includes ads being viewed in a context the customer did not want them to be displayed or blocking the ads from being placed where the client intends, in each case resulting in unanticipated financial obligations or impact.
Our platform also operates on our data processing equipment that is housed in third-party commercial data centers that we do not control or on servers owned and operated by cloud-based service providers, which may leave us vulnerable to technical issues or outages that we cannot easily control or remedy. Although we generally enter into service level agreements with these parties, we exercise no control over their operations, which makes us vulnerable to any errors, interruptions or delays that they may experience. All of these facilities and systems are vulnerable to interruption and/or damage from a number of sources, many of which are beyond our control, including, without limitation: (i) loss of adequate power or cooling and telecommunications failures; (ii) fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, and other natural disasters; (iii) software and hardware errors, failures, or crashes; (iv) financial insolvency; and (v) computer viruses, malware, hacking, terrorism, and similar disruptive problems. In particular, intentional cyber-attacks present a serious issue because they are difficult to prevent and remediate
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