One day after experiencing a massive outage across its ad network, Facebook, one of the most important online advertising platforms, is still seeing &intermittent& issues for its ad products at one of the most critical times of the year for advertisers. According to a spokesperson for the company, while most systems are restored there are still intermittent issues that could affect advertisers. For most of the day yesterday, advertisers were unable to create and edit campaigns through Ads Manager or the Ads API tools. The company said that existing ads were delivered, but advertisers could not set new campaigns or make any changes to existing campaigns, according to several users of the network. Reporting has been restored for all interfaces, according to the company, but conversion data may be delayed throughout the day for the Americas and in the evening for other regions. The company declined to comment on how many campaigns were affected by the outage or on whether it intends to compensate or make up for the outage with advertisers on the platform. Some advertisers are still experiencing outages and are not happy about it. I'm on 2 hours of sleep.
I have so much more I'm looking at an all nighter tonight.
And FB has the audacity to send me a message that says, "Happy Thanksgiving, our offices will be closed for Thanksgiving!" — David Herrmann (@herrmanndigital) November 21, 2018 It easy to make fun of us and laugh at us media buyers expenses bloggers.
However, I&m not.
Many small biz and, well, my livelihood are dependent on this working.
Fbook needs to be help accountable.
28 hours now of a broken ads manager has impacted one biz we work with already. — David Herrmann (@herrmanndigital) November 21, 2018 This is a bad look for a company that is already fighting fires on any number of other fronts.
But unlike the problems with bullying, hate speech, and disinformation that don&t impact the ways Facebook makes money, selling ads is actually how Facebook makes money. In the busiest shopping season of the year (and therefore one of the busiest advertising seasons of the year) for Facebook to have no response and for some developers to still be facing intermittent outages on the platform is a bad sign.