Facebook's glitch in its system for buying online ads has experienced outages and high disapproval rates just days before one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.
The glitch: Black Friday ads are being rejected by Facebook, according to marketers.
“We uploaded Black Friday ads for some clients last week that were doing pre-Black Friday promos,” one marketing agency told Digital New Daily.
“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 Business wrote in a post on Tuesday. “Campaigns that are live and running should not be affected and are still being delivered, although reporting is currently delayed. However, advertisers may experience issues creating new campaigns and making changes to existing campaigns.”
Ads were live for 48 hours and then some automated sweep disapproved the ads for saying "Black Friday" because it was racially insensitive and violated FB’s new terms of service policy on ethnic targeting.
“Gonna be a fun week,” the person with knowledge of the incident said.
On Tuesday, the system went down completely.
“Errors in editorial review issues must have ground the system to a halt,” the person said. “We’ve been unable to launch ads since 10:30 a.m. EST.”
Some who commented on Facebook’s post about the outage were less than impressed with the company’s style.
“All of the messaging I've seen today has been very cold and impersonal,” wrote Barry Hott in a comment. “Lots of ‘we're aware’ or ‘we're investigating’ and no empathy.
"I'd love to see a 'we're sorry' or 'we understand how difficult this is'," he wrote. "Facebook should be issuing a giant apology to advertisers right now. We're still people/customers," Hott added.
The system is now back up, but working more slowly than usual, users say.
If Facebook won’t hire human screeners then their other response teams are also robots.