Google Ads is experiencing a significant outage that is disrupting various reporting tools and product management features. This glitch is causing major concerns for advertisers who rely on these tools to manage their campaigns and access critical performance data.
Impact on advertisers
This outage has made several essential features unavailable, including the Report Editor, Dashboards, and Saved Reports in the web interface. Additionally, pages related to Products, Product Groups, and Listing Groups across the web, API, and Google Ads Editor are affected.
A more alarming issue is the exposure of unrelated item IDs, product titles, and Merchant Centre information to competitors. This glitch raises serious privacy concerns, as advertisers can identify their direct competitors by viewing exposed product titles.
Google's response
Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Liaison, acknowledged the problem on X (formerly Twitter). She assured users that Google is actively investigating the issue and will provide updates as more information becomes available. Advertisers are eager to see how quickly Google can resolve the outage and address the data exposure to mitigate the privacy breach fallout.
We're actively looking into an issue with Google Ads. Report Editor, Dashboards, and Saved Reports in the Google Ads web interface are currently down. The Products, Product Groups and Listing Groups pages are down across the web interface, API, and Google Ads Editor. Thank you…
— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) August 1, 2024
First report and bottom line
UK advertising agency Bidnamic on LinkedIn first reported the issue on July 30-31, 2024. Advertisers noticed they could see sensitive information about their competitors within their accounts.
In the meantime, advertisers are advised to exercise caution when accessing their Google Ads accounts. They should not act on any data until Google confirms that the issue has been resolved.
