Facebook Ads Manager problems affected many advertisers, days ahead of Black Friday

A number of advertisers were met with errors in Facebook Ads Manager on Tuesday.

This story has been updated.

Now is not a good time for an ad platform to get buggy.

Many Facebook and Instagram advertisers logged into their accounts on Tuesday — three days before Black Friday– to find they are unable to access their campaigns, upload creatives, download reporting or even contact customer service. Simultaneously, many users couldn’t access their accounts, and #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown were trending.

What happened? Facebook Ads Manager didn’t go down entirely, but starting Tuesday morning, it became buggy for many users. It’s not clear how many advertisers have been affected, but we can confirm the outages have been seen throughout the U.S.

Not a good week to get glitchy, Facebook. Attempting to upload new client videos for sale ads this weekend. Sounds like a lot of FB and IG functionality is down this morning.

— Akvile DeFazio (@AkvileDeFazio) November 20, 2018

The outage meant advertisers can’t see current performance stats or prepare for the impending, highly competitive and crucial Black Friday sales cycle.

Unreachable. Unless you’ve got a Facebook representative on speed dial, you may be out of luck getting through to anyone. The business contact us page was down as was the chat option on the official Facebook Ads Support Page.

I love how when @FacebookAds goes down, so does their customer support chat. Nice "feature" #fbadschat

— Melissa Mackey (@Mel66) November 20, 2018

Hoping for a response from the @FacebookAds account on Twitter? Not likely. The account has been dormant since 2011.

FWIW. Facebook is currently working to fix the problem. Reached for comment, Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Ads Manager. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

Facebook is now showing an alert in the Ads Manager interface about the problems and says campaigns that are live and running should not be affected and are still being delivered. However, advertisers may experience issues creating new campaigns and making changes to existing campaigns.

Update. Around 9:00 pm EST, Facebook posted a message in Ads Manager saying, “Access is restored but systems are still recovering.” Advertisers should be able to create and edit ads, however there may still be “intermittent issues” during recovery and delivery reporting may not be “up to date until after 2am PST.”

At 11:15 pm EST, a Facebook spokesperson emailed, “We resolved the underlying issue, but advertisers may still experience intermittent issues to Ads Manager which should improve over the next few hours. We understand this issue came during an important time of year for many advertisers and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was formerly Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.