Meta Ads Outage: Get Your Ad Refund From Meta

Howdy again Haveaclues! TWO NEWSLETTERS IN ONE WEEK?! What’s happening?!

This is a kinda sorta emergency newsletter since (as you’re probably already aware), there was a big Meta ads outage yesterday causing most advertisers to overspend extremely inefficiently.

(If this didn’t affect you, you can probably skip reading the rest of this email, but please hit reply and tell me why you’re subscribed if this isn’t relevant to you!)

Even if you already caught me talking about this on Twitter, LinkedIn, Foxwell Founders Slack, or TodayInDigital, I wanted to make sure you saw this and I added even more extra bits for my loyal Haveaclues subscribers:

History repeats itself

The last YouTube video I made was about a nearly identical situation last year. Check it out and I think you’ll be surprised to see how my guidance from that situation is the same as my guidance for this current situation:

What happened yesterday?

Yesterday’s Valentine’s Day outage was confirmed on Meta’s status page at 5:56pm EST.

From the accounts I could see and what I’m hearing from others, it appears to be mostly impacted campaigns and ad sets using cost caps and it seems like the caps were removed entirely, spending full budgets regardless of any actual performance.

The issue was marked resolved at 12:38 AM EST and I have not seen or heard any signs of the issue remaining today, but the damage was done yesterday and the performance sucked.

Valentine’s Day 2024 will forever be a bad performance day in ad accounts, which will also make the week, month, and quarter look bad. Do your best to remember this when analyzing those periods and consider excluding the day’s data when looking at performance. (Too bad there’s no way to annotate this in Ads Manager!)