Facebook's Ads System Suffers Glitch Days Before Black Friday

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-20/facebook-s-ads-system-suffers-glitch-days-before-black-friday

by mathattack • 8 years ago

78 20 8 years ago

puzzle• 8 years ago

Was this caused by changes rushed before a holiday code freeze? I know nothing about FB, but it's customary for companies to stop pushing new binaries in early-mid December and to leave ad systems alone a week before Black Friday or so.

mathattack• 8 years ago

Much more than a week!

seanyesmunt• 8 years ago

Yep. When I was at Walmart the code freeze started in early November, with only critical bug fixes going in, then continued until the start of January.

kenhwang• 8 years ago

I work in adtech and we went into code freeze about 2 weeks ago because the holidays are crazy.

xiphias22• 8 years ago

At another big company we had a code freeze as well, but we found a bug in a new feature that we released. We were not allowed to fix the bug, so we were reverting binaries of the data processing pipeline. The problem is that the data was already created and not backwards compatible, so we just created new problems... strict code freeze together with a huge feature push is always a nightmare.

fma• 8 years ago

My big company has code freezes and no planned deploys around holidays... Bug fixes are allowed, just need deviations.

Drakim• 8 years ago

That's why you should first have a feature freeze, and after a while go into a code freeze.

googlryas• 8 years ago

Does facebook follow this practice? I know at least some other FAANG companies do, but does this go against 'move fast and break things'?

stygiansonic• 8 years ago

Probably related the other outages on Tuesday?

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/outages-hit-facebook-...

cm20122• 8 years ago

I can speak for all FB advertisers when I say this was a huge pain in the ass.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

Perhaps, but it sounds like a rare win for actual users of facebook.

cm20122• 8 years ago

Facebook users, as a whole, like the Facebook ads I run for my clients. They click, share, comment and buy the products or services or advertise, which are all pretty solid.

There's almost no where else on the web where my products (SMB services, mostly) can be connected to my customers (business owners) at scale and at a reasonable cost, by the way.

jonathanjaeger• 8 years ago

The users were still seeing ads once Facebook, as a site, was back up. Just because campaign managers for ads couldn't use the Ads Manager, doesn't mean users don't see ads. For example, I had campaigns spending thousands of dollars, but I just had to guesstimate the cost because Ads Manager wasn't showing the data. That means I could be underspending or overspending because I couldn't optimize. It's a real headache for ad buyers, but once again, users still see ads.

type0• 8 years ago

I would rather give money to the mob than fb, at least those guys are more honest. I can't understand why anyone still thinks it's a good idea to give money to this monstrosity of a website.

squish78• 8 years ago

they probably think it's a good idea because they are able to advertise their product/service to potential customers, thereby increasing their revenue

sudovancity• 8 years ago

Hot take I know, but this has not bee a good year for Facebook.

dudurocha• 8 years ago

I work in an Ad Tech company and this week is crazy. We also try to make a code freeze but the reality is many deploys in production to fix things thursday evening...

rachelbythebay• 8 years ago

Fixers need good air cover.

Facebook's Ads System Suffers Glitch Days Before Black Friday

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