The big Google Ads reporting outage from the eve of August 1st was an intentional outage due to Google serving ads for products from other Google Merchant Center accounts. This was not just an ad spend issue but also a privacy and data issue for Google advertisers.
But don’t worry, Google will issue credits to the “small fraction of advertisers” that were impacted by this.
Google later admitted in its Google Ads status dashboard that the reporting outage was intentional. Google updated the dashboard to say, “We temporarily paused access to certain reports on August 1.” Why did they intentionally pause reporting? Because you were able to see your competitors product data?
Google wrote, “Starting on July 30, 16:54:38 PST, a small fraction of advertisers started serving ads for products from other Google Merchant Center accounts and were able to see those products in their Ads reporting. The serving issue was resolved on July 31, 11:27:35 PST.”
Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison added on X that Google will credit those advertisers that were impacted. She wrote, “We will be contacting all directly impacted customers with further details on this incident soon, and will be working towards issuing credits in the coming weeks.”
We will be contacting all directly impacted customers with further details on this incident soon, and will be working towards issuing credits in the coming weeks.
— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) August 2, 2024
Then on August 4th, Google posted this update:
For accounts that have not been affected by this issue, all reporting services have been restored. Thank you for your patience during this time and we apologize for the inconvenience.
