Both Google and Facebook's Ad platforms suffered glitches on Black Friday week

Google and Facebook’s bread and butter are the ads slots they sell to companies wishing to reach their users, so one would expect this would be the most steady and reliable part of their service.

It seems on one of the most intense days for the service,  this year’s Black Friday, their systems were not quite up to snuff.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google’s Google Display & Video 360 platform suffered glitches worldwide for up to 6 hours on Friday, preventing companies from purchasing or modifying ads, targeting a different audience and otherwise update their settings.

“This morning, campaign reporting in the customer interface for Google Display & Video 360 experienced a partial, temporary disruption,” admitted a  Google spokesman. “Our teams identified and remediated the cause of the reporting disruption.”

Facebook suffered similar issues, though earlier in the week on Tuesday, where their Ads manager suffered several hours of outages. A Facebook spokesman apologized for the issue and said the underlying problem has now been resolved.

“We understand this issue came during an important time of year for many advertisers and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused,” they noted.

Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research, noted that while Google Display & Video 360 had more than 50% market share, outages like these may also remind advertisers there is “always a balance between the advantage of integration with a single provider of a solution and becoming overly dependent on that provider.”

Dare Obasanjo, the leader of the product team behind Bing Ads, notes that they had “no major glitches on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.”

Black Friday is a tough week for ad platforms and really proud of the @bingads team for executing with no major glitches on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. ?https://t.co/xz8nesqIle

— Dare Obasanjo? (@Carnage4Life) November 24, 2018

Microsoft has been seeing steady gains in their Bing Ads business, which reportedly has more than 33% market share in USA.