Facebook’s advertising system went into shambles starting at 2 a.m. Sunday, charging marketers extra money for ads no one saw. reports She reports that Meta, the social network’s parent company, has charged some advertisers more than double the amount they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars.. Meta briefly took part of its advertising ecosystem offline with practically no connection to its millions of customers.
The company confirmed the error occurred and promised to follow the “normal refund process,” but didn’t share much about what went wrong. The problem comes just days after the Meta Third round of layoffs in six months.
“A now-resolved technical issue caused ad serving issues for some advertisers,” said a Meta spokesperson. The spokesperson said the flaw affected ad serving on Facebook, not on Instagram or other Meta properties. Advertisers affected by Twitter bug they He did not receive a notice of this.
On Sunday, countless advertisers noticed a spike in the amount Meta was charging them, exceeding the limits they had set for certain campaigns.. In some cases, the system consumed entire advertising budgets in a matter of hours. Even worse, ad campaigns weren’t performing any better—that is, not showing ads to more people or driving more clicks—even though Meta was pulling more money out of people’s accounts.
The meta ad network is opaque even to people who work in ad technology. Generally, the way it works is that advertisers tell Meta their goals, set a budget, and wait while the company’s algorithm runs the campaigns for them. For example, a gaming company might say it wants to spend $5,000 over a two-week period to try to get parents to visit its website. Meta controls exactly how much money is spent and when it is spent. Advertisers can check the Meta system to get a report on how well an ad campaign is performing, but advertisers don’t know exactly what’s going on on the other side.
With no word from the company, marketers have been left with a tough decision: pause their ad campaigns, or stay the course and trust Meta to make things right. For large companies, taking this kind of gamble on a day’s worth of advertising may not be much of a problem. But millions of small businesses rely on the Meta ad network, and many of them operate on very thin margins. For them, the consequences can be dire.
“We shouldn’t take action when Facebook has something wrong. For small businesses that don’t have an ear on Facebook, there’s not a lot of choice,” said Barry Holt, a longtime advertising consultant who has run ad campaigns on Facebook for more than a decade. Meta just relies on advertisers to bend over and grab it.”
Even compared to other tech companies, Meta has problems with transparency. Often, the only indicator that advertisers have that Meta knows something is wrong is a status page It informs advertisers whether the system is working or not.
Meta can get away with this kind of problem because there isn’t a lot of competition. Meta and Google control about 50% in the digital advertising market. companies like AmazonAnd Tik TokAnd apple They grow their advertising business. But for certain types of ads, Meta is basically the only game in town.
“Mita is very mysterious, and she always has been,” said Holt. “All we get is a general explanation that we ‘know there is a problem.’ It’s better than nothing, but it’s not enough.”
The company’s refund offer is good news for its legions of frustrated advertisers, but Holt said it’s a slow and complicated process. You can burn hours and resources complaining and begging them for refunds and credits. “Sometimes it works, but it may not be worth the investment,” Holt said. “And when recovery comes, it could be months away.”