Bing Ads has been suffering from some serious down time since the afternoon of Saturday 6th February, when they opened an incident ticket at 4:00 p.m. as problems hit. Since then, engineers have been striving to eradicate the unknown ghoul in their system. With the Bing reporting facility down, annoyed customers began mass-reporting problems they’d endured for several days, taking to social media to vent their frustrations. All elements of the platform have been affected by this outage, including the Web User Interface, Application Programming Interface, Bing Ads Editor and Mobile applications. Perhaps the worst part is the loss of key performance data, which has left advertisers fumbling in the dark over the performance of their campaigns, through the sudden and alarming disappearance of information on clicks, impressions and conversions. Worse still for some, information on spend has vanished, which many advertisers like to keep a close eye on. As if that wasn’t enough, Microsoft are reporting that Bing Shopping catalog processing’s lagging 48 hours behind normal operation, with processing on uploaded feed files estimated at taking up to 2 days to complete. Customers trying to see their billing information are getting a reporting interface error message saying that the data ‘might not show the exact value’! Microsoft hasn’t divulged what’s causing the problem, if indeed they know. Initially, on Sunday morning at 5.00am, in an update they optimistically announced that the fix would take a few hours and then data should start to flow across the whole of Bing Ads once more. Unfortunately their predictions didn’t come true and they were forced to issue a watered-down update to say that their technical support and engineering team had deployed a fix and, as a result, some improvements were already being detected. Reports show that this lead to some data being repopulated, although things are still patchy. Leader of engineering for Bing Ads, Dare Obasanjo, together with the Bing Ads social team, have been doing their best to respond to a bombardment of social media complaints and questions from exasperated customers who are clamoring for a solution as soon as possible. Responding to tweets, Obasanjo has very honestly revealed that there’s no timescale yet as regards a solution, but he’s reassured advertisers that their the data is still safe behind the scenes and will be restored to normal once the problem has been rectified. Microsoft are working hard to sort out the problems and have asked concerned customers to check their Bing Ads Platform Health Blog for updates on the incident report.
10th February 2016
