Right before the Thanksgiving holiday season and right before the big holiday shopping season, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Google Ads sent emails to some advertisers telling them their ads are no longer running and their accounts were suspended. This was a technical issue, a bug, with the Google Ads system and Google said they can be ignored.
Kirk Williams posted about this on X on Wednesday late afternoon, he shared a screenshot of the subject line from an email that read, "Alert | Your Shopping ads are no longer running on Google."
He added, "We're suddenly getting clients freaking out that their GMC got suspended by this email (not true, we send them back screenshots of GMC and their ads in the wild to assure them). Anyone else receive these?? Seems to be some generic form email. What in the world would possess someone at @googleads to send an email like this hours before the Thanksgiving holiday to brands so they all (rightfully) freak out thinking GMC dropped their products, only to realize this seems to be an error or promotional email?"
Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, responded Friday morning confirming this is a bug. She wrote on X, "We’ve identified a technical issue that incorrectly triggered this notification. The message is incorrect and can be ignored. Additional comms explaining will be sent. Apologies!"
Google will send a follow up email to those impacted.
What horrible timing!
We’ve identified a technical issue that incorrectly triggered this notification. The message is incorrect and can be ignored. Additional comms explaining will be sent. Apologies!
— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) November 24, 2023
Forum discussion at X.
Update: Here is the email telling advertisers the email was a mistake, several days later...
Got a email from Google about my Shopping Ads being paused, but turns out it was a false alarm! 🚨🙌 Just received another email saying it was sent in error.
— Shameem Adhikarath (@shemiadhikarath) November 28, 2023
cc: @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/xfFQRZKocR