A bug or glitch affected Meta’s advertising platform last week wiping out some firms’ advertising budgets.
According to Gizmodo, Facebook advertisers say that they experienced a strange glitch last weekend forcing them to pay as much as twice the usual ad rates. These advertisers were charged rates as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars for ads they claim that no one was able to view even though this was denied by Facebook parent Meta. This happened at 2 am last Sunday and for a brief period Meta removed all ads from its network and at the same time, it barely spoke with its advertising customers.
The glitch affected mostly advertisers on Facebook although some Instagram advertisers were also affected. A Meta spokesman said, “A technical issue that has now been resolved caused ad delivery issues for some advertisers.” Last Sunday not only did advertisers notice that they were being charged more than Meta was supposed to charge them for ads, but they also spent more money that budgeted for specific campaigns.
Amazingly, complete advertising budgets were wiped out in just a few hours. And the ads were not being shown to any more users than usual and didn’t even drive more clicks despite all of the money that was being drained from advertisers’ accounts. And as we mentioned earlier, some advertisers said that their ads were not being viewed at all.
