• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 4, 2025

Google now sees more than 5 trillion searches on Google annually. When its Google Ads platform stopped serving ads this past weekend, the company immediately apologized to advertisers worldwide that were experiencing the disruption.

Some advertisers faced challenges with high latency, error messages, and other issues. The glitch -- which some advertisers estimated cost them tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue -- led to displaced ad spend and lower conversions.

The disruption began March 1 and lingered for hours, according to those who took to message boards on Reddit and Google Groups. 

An update published Monday to the Google Ads Status Dashboard said the issue had been resolved. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” Google wrote.

Reddit user TTFV posted on March 2 that two of its Google Ads client accounts did not serve any ads on Saturday.

“No notices, changes, disapprovals, suspensions, payment problems, or other issues,” the post read. “We see no Google Ads activity in GA4 so it's not just delayed reporting. Google specialty support team [seems] too busy to respond immediately. This makes me wonder if they have a global issue with some accounts.”

TTFV also wrote that Google’s ad preview tool also showed ads not serving, but with no explanation. The fact that the team assigned to address issues like this is too busy to look at it shows perhaps thousands of accounts could have been affected.

Caspera99, another Reddit user, wrote that this happened to one of its clients too.

Google support initially blamed the user interface, suggesting it was a reporting issue but they were still running.

The issue spanned worldwide across accounts. UK-based accounts run by Reddit user HairycakeLinehan did not receive impressions or clicks on Saturday.

On a Google chat group, Partyhall wrote about a 9-year old account that has never seen an issue.

“This is for sure 100% nothing from our side,” Partyhall wrote. “We have very high volume traffic every single day with [an] average of 500 conversions a day. Today from 00:00, until now 20:40, not one single impression across the whole account. It's been soon 24h with this problem.”

Another Google Group user said they had experienced the same problems as others, with no data at all as of March 1, 2025, lasting through the following day and no shopping ads served on a 5-year old account. Everything just stopped serving on Saturday. 

MediaPost has reached out to Google for clarity on what caused the disruption.