Facebook Ads Not Performing or Outage? What Changed in 2026

· 7 min read · Updated

Two different problems get typed into Google the same way. One is “Meta is broken today”, which happens, and passes. The other is “my account stopped working and I do not know why”, which does not pass on its own. This post separates them, because the first step on any account that has suddenly dropped is working out which one you are looking at.

Is Meta down? The five minute check

Five checks to tell a Meta outage from an account problem: metastatus.com Ads Manager status, whether every campaign dropped at the same minute, whether the daily budget was spent in the first hour, whether advertiser communities are reporting it, and whether Shopify orders fell with Meta reported purchases

Open metastatus.com and look at the Ads Manager row. The history page lists recent incidents. Know that the status page lags: in November 2025 advertisers had been reporting problems for days while the page showed green, and agencies told AdExchanger it is often inaccurate.

Then look at your own account, which is more reliable than Meta’s page.

If every campaign dropped at the same minute, it is the platform. Your campaigns do not share a creative or an audience, so they do not all fail together on their own.

If the daily budget was spent in the first hour of the day, usually between 1 and 2am in your target region, that is a pacing bug, which is a platform fault.

If CPMs fell to a third of normal and impressions tripled while conversions went nowhere, Meta is delivering your conversion campaign as reach. Also a platform fault.

If one campaign dropped and the rest held, it is yours. Skip to the second half.

Advertiser communities confirm faster than Meta does. r/FacebookAds on Reddit fills within an hour of a real incident, and the same names on X, David Herrmann and Sean Frank among them, have called every major one since 2023.

The incident log, 2023 to 2026

This is the list I keep, because the next time it happens you will want to know whether the pattern is new. Dates are when the reports started.

Meta Ads incident log from 2023 to 2026: April 2023 overspend bug, May 2023 Lattice rollout and the instability that followed through Q1 2024, the February 2024 CPM spike, April 2024 Bloomberg and Verge coverage then recovery, the November 2025 pacing and creative glitches, and the January 2026 delivery outage

April 2023. A systems error caused significant overspend on many accounts over a weekend. Meta refunded some of it.

May 2023. Meta rolls out Lattice, a new delivery model. From June, advertisers report CPMs doubling, cold traffic quality collapsing and ROAS falling with no change on their side. I was running accounts at 10 to 12X on lookalikes that halved over the summer. Performance recovered through Q4 2023, as it usually does when retail demand rises.

February 2024. A server side bug lifted CPMs roughly tenfold for about an hour across most of one agency’s 37 accounts, reported to Digiday by Hype10. Meta fixed it the next day and did not communicate. The spring decline that followed was the second Lattice wave.

April 2024. Bloomberg covers the instability on 10 April; The Verge on 28 April. On 25 April every account I manage returned to normal within a day of each other, which is itself evidence it was Meta.

Late October to November 2025. The one advertisers called Glitchmas. Budgets spent in the first hour at 150 percent of the daily cap. Conversion campaigns delivering at $10 CPMs instead of $30 to $60 with impressions nobody wanted. Advantage+ Shopping creatives rendering zoomed in or out. Meta’s generative creative tools producing off brand ads for a month, and in at least one reported case promoting a 100 percent discount. IsDown logged an Ads Manager delivery outage on 10 November. Meta said it had fixed a few bugs and saw no further concerning trends; advertisers reported issues through at least 21 November. Large brands got credits. Small ones got a support form.

January 2026. A two hour Ads Manager delivery outage on 8 to 9 January, confirmed on Meta’s own status page.

March and May 2026. Ad Library and transparency tools down for hours to days. Annoying for research, no effect on delivery.

If today’s problem matches one of those shapes, it is probably Meta. Wait, document, do not restructure. If it does not, keep reading.

It is not an outage. Six causes, in order

These are in the order I check them on a client account, which is the order of how often they turn out to be the cause.

1. Tracking stopped recording. Compare Shopify orders to Meta reported purchases for the same days. If Shopify is steady and Meta fell, the ads are fine and the pixel or Conversions API stopped reporting. The campaign will then start optimising towards the wrong signal and get worse for real, so this is urgent even though the sales are still there. The diagnostic is in Meta not recording add to carts or purchases.

2. Creative similarity collapsed your delivery. You launched 20 ads and Meta spends on two. That is not a bug. Since Andromeda, Meta groups near identical creatives under one entity and the group competes against itself. The fix is fewer, more different concepts, and the explanation is in why Meta only spends on a few of your ads.

3. Fatigue on the creative that was carrying the account. Frequency over 3 on cold traffic in a week, CTR sliding, CPC rising. One winning ad usually carries more of the account than anyone admits, and when it tires the whole account looks broken. Facebook ad fatigue covers how to spot it and why uploading a recolour does not reset it.

4. The structure is from the wrong era. Thirty ad sets with stacked interests, cost caps on a learning campaign, lookalikes on a 1 percent seed. All of it worked once. What Meta Andromeda changed explains why the retrieval system now rewards consolidation, and the scaling structure is what I run instead: a small number of campaigns, Advantage+ Shopping fed with a clean customer list, and creative as the variable.

5. The store stopped converting the traffic. A price change, a shipping threshold, a broken checkout step on mobile, a theme update. The ads bring the same people and fewer of them buy, and Meta’s numbers take the blame. The eight things to fix when ads run but nothing sells is the checklist version, the CRO audit page lists what to check, and trust vs traffic covers the version of this that is not technical.

6. The market moved. Competitor CPMs in Q4, a category trend ending, a platform change like the one that sent Meta Shops checkout back to websites. Rarer than people think, and usually visible in CPM alone before anything else changes.

What to do during an outage

Do not restructure. Learning resets, and when the incident ends you will not know whether your change or Meta’s fix did it.

Pause anything visibly overspending. A campaign that spent its day in an hour will do it again tomorrow until Meta fixes pacing.

Screenshot Ads Manager with timestamps, note the campaign IDs and the spend against budget, and submit a support case the same day. That record is the only thing that produces a credit for an account without a rep, and even then it is not guaranteed.

Keep a cheap always-on Google Shopping campaign running under the Meta spend. On the 700K beauty account it was the channel that kept revenue moving through every Meta wobble, because it catches people who already decided to buy.

If it is still not clear

Most accounts that come to me describing an outage turn out to be cause one or two. Most accounts that come to me describing a creative problem turn out to be cause one. The order above exists because tracking faults imitate everything else.

If you have run the five minute check and the six causes and still cannot tell, book a call, or read how I work an account first. I audit Meta and Google accounts spending over $5,000 a month in the US, Canada and Europe, and the first thing I open is the Shopify versus Meta purchase comparison.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

How do I check if Facebook Ads is down right now?
Open metastatus.com and look at the Ads Manager row under Business Tools; the history page lists recent incidents. Then check your own account: if delivery is flat across every campaign at the same minute, or the daily budget was spent in the first hour, it is platform side. If one campaign dropped and the rest did not, it is yours. Advertiser communities such as r/FacebookAds fill up within an hour of a real outage, and Meta's status page often lags them.
Why are my Facebook ads suddenly not performing in 2026?
In the order I find them on accounts: tracking that stopped recording purchases, creative similarity collapsing your ads into one that gets all the spend, creative fatigue on a cold audience, an account structure built for the pre Andromeda era, a store that does not convert the traffic, or a platform incident. The first five are yours to fix. The last one passes.
Was there a Facebook Ads outage in November 2025?
Yes. Advertisers reported budgets spent in the first hour of the day at 150 percent of the daily cap, conversion campaigns delivering cheap low quality impressions at around a third of normal CPMs, Advantage+ creatives rendering wrongly, and Meta's AI creative tools producing off brand ads, through at least 21 November 2025. IsDown logged an Ads Manager delivery outage on 10 November. Meta said it had fixed a few technical bugs. Large advertisers reported receiving credits; small ones mostly did not.
What was the Meta Lattice problem in 2023 and 2024?
Meta rolled out Lattice, a new ad delivery model, in May 2023. From June 2023 advertisers reported CPMs doubling and ROAS collapsing with no change on their side. It eased in Q4 2023, returned in February 2024 with a server side CPM spike, was covered by Bloomberg in April 2024, and settled around 25 April 2024 on every account I manage.
Should I change my campaigns during a Meta outage?
No. Restructuring during an incident resets learning and you will not be able to tell whether the fix or the incident ending made the difference. Pause campaigns that are visibly overspending, screenshot Ads Manager with timestamps, note the campaign IDs, and submit a support case so you have a record if credits are offered.
How do I know whether the drop is tracking rather than performance?
Compare Shopify orders to Meta reported purchases for the same days. If Shopify is steady and Meta fell, the ads are probably still working and the pixel or Conversions API stopped reporting them. If both fell together, it is delivery or the store.
Does Meta compensate advertisers for glitches?
Sometimes, as ad credits rather than refunds, and mostly for accounts with a rep. Agencies reporting the November 2025 issues said large brands got credits and small advertisers had little recourse. A documented support case is the only route that exists for an account without a rep.
Nikhil Sharma

Nikhil Sharma

I run data and operations for a DTC brand on Shopify, consult on Meta and Google Ads, and build AI automations for ecommerce teams. I write about what I build and run.

Book a call More about me