Google Ads outage causes billing confusion

Google confirmed that there was an “account failure problem” that caused some ads to stop showing for a period of time on the afternoon of September 22nd. This resulted in a number of advertisers becoming confused as they checked their stats and billing reports.

Kirk Williams asked further yesterday Twitter “Did anyone else see a strange billing bug in Google Ads last night? Just a few others talked about it, only a few accounts were affected. Ads fell and then came back with a vengeance after what I thought was a fix implemented.” Many replied that they saw this.

Ginny Marvin of Google confirmed shortly after a problem with Twittershe said, “An account outage (PST) occurred on the afternoon of September 22nd, causing some ads to temporarily stop showing. This has been resolved and no action is required.”

Hi Kirk, on the afternoon (PST) of September 22nd, there was an account failure issue that caused some ads to temporarily stop showing. The problem has been resolved and no action is required.

– Ginny Marvin (@GinnyMarvin) September 23, 2021

Here are some complaints about this issue:

I had 6 accounts (unlinked) all of them receiving billing notifications at almost the same time yesterday. They all still have the warning banner at the top of the UI today, but the Transactions section doesn’t show any issues and shows ads. #ppcchat

– Rev. Matt Poldberg (@NotSpamIpromise) September 23, 2021

Yes sir. Ads were paused for “billing issue”, but the account hadn’t even hit the threshold and there were no billing warnings in the account. Approximately 4-6 PST.

– Leslie Drechsler (@ppcbuyers) September 23, 2021

Reach around 40% of our accounts. Resolved around 10am EST this morning

– Tony Chopp (@tonychopp) September 23, 2021

Yes, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. pt

– Andy (@andrewghayes) September 23, 2021

You can find more complaints about this at Twitter.

So you are not alone once you have seen this problem.

Forum discussion at Twitter.