Merry Glitchmas! To all who observe.
For the uninitiated, “Glitchmas” is our name for what’s become an annual tradition, when, from between roughly late October through November, Meta’s ad platform just seems to go bonkers.
Among ecommerce brand marketers and social media ad agency buyers and consultants, the 2017 and 2018 holiday seasons are spoken of in hushed, ominous tones, as if by the survivors of a terrible plague. Those were years when tens of thousands of Facebook advertisers and agencies experienced wholesale account lockouts and catastrophic ad delivery issues straight through Black Friday.
But 2025 has been another ugly one so far, at least by modern Glitchmas standards, including major ad delivery issues and AI-based product failures affecting advertisers through the end of last week, according to 10 social advertisers who spoke with AdExchanger anonymously due to concerns about publicly criticizing Meta.
From Meta’s perspective, “our ads system continues to help millions of businesses grow and find the customers that matter to them,” a company spokesperson told AdExchanger over email. “We vigorously monitor our systems to try to prevent issues before they happen and take swift action when a bug or technical issue is detected.”
AdExchanger was informed by Meta early last week that it sees no further concerning trends with its ad platform after fixing a few technical bugs.
However, six advertisers told AdExchanger that, through Friday, they’ve seen major new ad platform issues and outages. They also spoke of increasingly desperate and largely unsuccessful attempts to elevate these issues to human beings at Meta who could potentially address the problems.
What’s gone wrong
But what specifically are advertisers seeing misfire within their ad accounts?
Unlike previous Glitchmas seasons, when sometimes thousands of accounts were incorrectly locked or suspended, this year the issues are more random and scattered.
For instance, advertisers can get into their accounts but sometimes can’t set up or clone a new campaign.
Meanwhile, much like in previous years, advertisers are running into a familiar budget pacing issue. Meta’s system has been burning through their entire budgets – sometimes even 150% or more of their full daily budget – in the first hour of the day and often during odd hours, like between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. in their target region. (Meta’s system allows it to spend 150% to 200% of a daily budget in a single day.)
Although those campaign impressions are being served, the traffic is of extremely poor quality and generates few conversions. By the time their target audiences are actually browsing online and shopping, there’s no budget left.
And that’s not the only performance issue.
Conversion-based performance campaigns that normally see CPMs in the $30 to $60 range are not targeting the audiences or generating the type of traffic those advertisers would typically see, according to three Meta advertisers. Instead, those campaigns are bringing in traffic more like a wide reach campaign with CPMs around $10.
The system seems to be prioritizing cheap reach, but even for the priciest direct conversion campaigns.
To add insult to injury, since Meta is serving valid ads in those cases, securing reimbursements for the wasted spend has proven next to impossible thus far, numerous advertisers told AdExchanger.
When large brands lose six- or seven-digit sums as a result of misspent budgets that don’t deliver much in the way of tangible results, they get ad credits back, one social agency advertiser told AdExchanger. Small advertisers, however, that may only spend a few thousand per day, say they have little recourse and must simply accept, as the advertiser put it, that Meta “draws on their accounts like a personal ATM machine.”
There also are major creative issues, mostly stemming from widespread adoption of Meta’s generative AI creative ad products.
Advertisers say Meta’s AI creative feature has been generating strange, off-brand ads for the past month, a problem that persisted through last week. They’ve had to manually go into the system to kill ads that were generated by the tool, some of which featured awkward copy or even flagrantly distorted visuals – think warped heads and bodies, way too much skin and other obvious signs of generative AI.
Beyond issues with the images themselves, advertisers also complain Meta’s AI-powered tools are creating delivery problems. For example, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, Meta’s AI-operated ad product for ecommerce brands, has been serving ads that are oddly zoomed in or out and fail to dynamically adjust to fit different screen and ad unit sizes – something Meta usually handles smoothly.
And that’s not all. Two advertisers report that Meta has been automatically enabling an AI-powered price and promo feature even if they didn’t ask for it. This tool can adjust promotional deals up or down and, according to two advertisers, sometimes identifies old sale prices in an account and sets those as the default offers, typically favoring higher ones (because performance).
David Herrmann, who heads a boutique social agency called Herrmann Digital, posted on X that the Meta AI had even taken the liberty of advertising a 100% off deal, because there had been codes created by the account for sending comped gifts.
Is anybody home?
Meta’s ad-serving glitches this year are exacerbated by its abandonment of most of its human customer service and account management.
This is not a new trend but a worsening one.
Over the past few years, Meta has laid off tens of thousands of employees. As a result, many advertisers lost their dedicated human points of contact who have been replaced by chatbot-style responses. Three agency buyers told AdExchanger that even buyers who spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year are often unable to get a human response for help with severe account glitches or major budget issues.
They’ll be told instead that the system is working fine or they’ll be directed to the Meta Ads Manager status page, which flags when there are platform outages. But the status page is often, like the platform itself, incorrect and not trustworthy.
Major Meta advertisers have been taking increasingly desperate steps to work around the broken account management system and reach actual humans inside the company. Two advertisers said that, as part of an informal coalition, they were able to get VP-level support and resolve some of their ad serving issues. A European agency buyer, meanwhile, told AdExchanger that they were able to fix a few account problems by connecting with a responsive Meta employee thanks to an introduction by a friend inside the company.
What’s frustrating, this European ad buyer said, is that the fixes are often quick and easy. The hard part is getting somebody inside Meta to do something.
Which also isn’t a new problem. In 2023, Meta fired a few customer service reps who had been taking bribes from advertisers to have account issues seen to. There really wasn’t anything nefarious happening, other than the bribes. The advertisers didn’t want special access or to undercut rival brands; they just wanted normal customer service complaints seen to in a timely manner.
None of the advertisers AdExchanger spoke with this year mentioned any such schemes.
“Not that I wouldn’t pay a few thousand dollars to have any of these problems fixed,” said one agency buyer who was among those who informed AdExchanger of the pay-for-account-service scheme back in 2023. “But the people have been replaced by AI chatbots, and they can’t be bribed. I’ve tried.”
