Facebook’s advertising system went haywire starting around 2 am on Sunday morning, charging marketers extra money for ads that no one saw. Reports suggest Meta, the social network’s parent company, charged some advertisers more than double what they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meta briefly took part of its ad system offline with practically zero communication to its millions of customers.
The company confirmed the bug happened and promised to follow its “normal refund process,” but shared very little about what went wrong. The problem comes just days after the Meta began its third round of layoffs in six months.
A technical issue that has now been resolved caused ad delivery issues for some advertisers,” a Meta spokesperson said. The glitch affected ad delivery on Facebook, not Instagram or Meta’s other properties, the spokesperson said. Advertisers affected by the glitch tweeted they didn’t receive a notification about it.
On Sunday, an untold number of advertisers noticed a dramatic spike in the amount Meta was charging them, going beyond the limits they had set for certain campaigns. In some cases, the system ate up entire advertising budgets in a matter of hours. Worse, the ad campaigns weren’t performing better—that is, the ads weren’t being shown to more people or driving more clicks—even though Meta was pulling more money from people’s accounts.
The Meta ad network is opaque even to people who work in the ad tech business. In general, the way it works is that advertisers tell Meta their goals, set a budget, and wait as the company’s algorithm runs campaigns on their behalf. For example, a toy company might say it wants to spend $5,000 over two weeks to try and get parents to visit its website. Meta controls exactly how much money is spent and when. Advertisers can check Meta’s system for a report on how well the ad campaign is performing, but advertisers don’t know exactly what’s happening on the other side.
