Facebook's ad platform has crashed - causing chaos just days before Black Friday

Advertisement
Facebook's ad platform has crashed - causing chaos just days before Black Friday

Mark Zuckerberg

Reuters

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, whose ad tool was down for much of Tuesday.

Advertisement
  • Facebook's Ads Manager is currently down, leaving some customers unable to create new advertisements or campaigns.
  • It's a major outage, stretching into its eighth hour - and comes right before Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales.
  • It's already causing chaos.

Facebook's advertising platform is suffering from a major outage.

The company's Ads Manager, its tool that lets users create advertisements on its social network, has crashed, leaving would-be advertisers unable to create new ad campaigns just days before Thanksgiving and crucial Black Friday sales.

Complimentary Tech Event
Transform talent with learning that works
Capability development is critical for businesses who want to push the envelope of innovation.Discover how business leaders are strategizing around building talent capabilities and empowering employee transformation.Know More

The outage is unusual in its duration; as of this writing, the system has been down for more than eight hours, one source who buys ads on the platform told Business Insider.

"It happens for little blips all the time," the source said. "Most [of] the time it's fixed super-fast, and it's a non-issue. I've seen it out for a 'day' before, but I don't recall a year this happened two days before Thanksgiving."

Advertisement

A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. But a company representative confirmed the outage to Bloomberg, saying that people and companies can't create new ads or change their existing campaigns. Advertisements previously launched through the system are still running on Facebook, the representative said.

Given Facebook's importance in the digital advertising market, the outage is already causing havoc as retailers try and prepare for what is traditionally one of the biggest shopping events of the year.

The outage will also likely mean there will be a huge backlog of advertisements that will require human approval - and further delays - once the system is back up and running, the source said. Facebook tends to manually review items with sensitive content or red-flag terms, such as "feminine products, art, copyrighted stuff, similar names to a big brand, underwear with models wearing it, etc.," the source said.

Facebook and Instagram (which Facebook owns) were also down for some users earlier on Tuesday.

"I've worked in social media for 5+ years and have dealt with the occasional outage here and there," said Ashley Audet, social strategy and operations director at MediaCrossing. "But this it by far the largest scale outage that I have experienced thus far."

Advertisement

Do you work at Facebook? Do you know more? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

{{}}