As Facebook works to manage the ongoing tension and confusion around the US election, it seems that something may have gone awry within its ad processing systems, which has caused some major headaches for marketers over the past 24 hours.
In the afternoon yesterday (US time), Facebook acknowledged that a high number of advertisers were ‘experiencing issues with their accounts, such as ad rejections’.
This came after a flood of complaints on Twitter, as social media managers worked to deal with the problems.
In fact, according to one analysis, Google search queries for ‘Facebook ad account disabled’ jumped 1050% in just a few hours yesterday, underlining the scope of the issue.
So what was the problem? Well, we don’t know, but shortly after registering the issue, Facebook did say that it had resolved the issue, and that the backlog would clear shortly.
There was a technical issue that caused some FB ads & ad accounts to be mistakenly disabled. We identified and resolved the issue within a couple of hours, and access should now be restored
— Rob Leathern (@robleathern) November 6, 2020
So all the problems should now be fixed – if you’re still experiencing Facebook ad issues, it’s likely not related to this error.
For reference, you can check out the status of Facebook’s ad systems at any time here.
The notes listed on the current status page refer to a ‘technical issue’ which has since been restored, so no specific info on the error at hand, but assurance that it should be all good now.
We’ve asked Facebook for more information on the cause of the error and will update this post if/when we hear back.
