An ongoing issue causing Facebook ads manager to spend far above their budgets unproductively has advertisers scrambling to cut off all spend and recoup spend that went out in error. Advertisers use Facebook ads manager to advertise on both Facebook and Instagram.

In human terms, Meta appears to be charging advertisers for advertising wildly over the budget limits that advertisers have set. And this additional overspend on advertising had no seemingly effect on sales or other KPIs. And advertisers are reacting to this by ‘shutting off’ all their ads.

“We are experiencing one of the largest FB overspend issues I have ever seen,” agency CEO @TaylorHoliday tweeted early this morning. “This is the most egregious I've ever seen. Some in our portfolio hit $50k by 8am PST with absolutely ZERO traffic driven. Our limit rules were even disregarded. Everything from startup to legacy brands completely overspent. Working with reps now but still no definitive answer,” said @jaketheadnerd, another ad agency founder responded.

Though the size of the issue here is unclear, that advertisers are reacting by shutting off spend completely is a potentially big problem for Facebook’s ad revenue, which is possibly experiencing a sudden, sheer drop.

“DTC Twitter is a very small bubble and most advertisers and larger agencies are still blindly spending and won't notice anything was wrong until tomorrow morning,” @Gil_RunDMG, an agency owner, tweeted. But if the bug isn’t resolved by tomorrow morning when everyone gets to work, it’s fair to expect them to turn ads off until the situation is resolved.

@TripleWhale, a growth analytics platform for e-commerce companies, tweeted that “by 10am EST on a typical Sunday this month, spend across a sample of ~2,300 shops in the US using TW was about $1.5m. Today it was more like $3.7m, but Pixel clicks were absolutely flat.”

Adam Humphreys, who co-founded the women’s luxury footwear brand Labucq and manages their ad spend on Instagram and Facebook, told me over DM that he “learned about the issue at 5:30 in the morning Pacific time and immediately paused” all their spend. “It’s a shit show,” he said.

“We feel for all the brands impacted and for the engineering + account teams at @Meta, who we're sure are totally freaking out,” Triple Whale tweeted.

Some ads users who are affected by the issue have tweeted that their Facebook rep said Meta will issue refunds for the aberrant spend.

-Brandon Gorrell