Google Ads stop running for some advertisers

Some advertisers noticed their ads weren’t running and not getting impressions or clicks, starting Saturday, March 1. The ads are simply not being served or delivered. In fact, there are tons of complaints about this in the Google Ads Forum.

Update: Now resolved. On the morning of March 3, Google confirmed the issue and then a few hours later said the issue was resolved. We still do not know what happened and whether this was some sort of bug or policy change.

At 1 am ET Google posted:

• “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Ads. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Google Ads, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior. Starting from March 1st 2025, Ads are not being served for a small number of Google Ads customers.”

Then at 4:18 am ET Google posted:

• “The problem with Google Ads has been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”

Original story:

What we know. Starting March 1, some advertisers said that some of their campaigns were not serving ads. Some advertisers said they received zero impressions or clicks on their ads. The crazy thing, this has been now going on for almost two days and Google has not responded about the issue, at least not yet, since it is the weekend.

We do not know exactly how widespread the issue. However, as I covered at Search Engine Roundtable, there are tons of complaints about this issue.

Example. Here is a chart I shared from the forums showing the drop in impressions and clicks:

The cause? It is unclear what the cause is but Navah Hopkins posted on LinkedIn her theory, she wrote:

• “Looks like eCPC got disapproved – my other theory is that it’s tied to Google Business Profile (brands connecting their GBP for local ads). Anyone with a GBP connected to their Google Ads NOT experiencing the outage?”

I suspect it might be related to the enhanced CPC for Search and Display Ads deprecating in March, but it is unclear.

Why we care. If you manage a Google Ads account, you may want to check if the ads ran over the weekend. If not, you may want to reach out to your ad representative at Google to find out what is wrong.