Incident Report Resolved

Google Ad Manager Outage
March 24-25, 2026

A 6-hour disruption affected Google Ad Manager users globally, causing error messages, high latency, and intermittent access issues.

March 25, 2026 | 4 min read | Google Ads

Incident Summary

Start Time: March 24, 2026 18:00 UTC
End Time: March 25, 2026 00:00 UTC
Duration: ~6 hours
Status: Resolved

What Happened

On the evening of March 24, 2026, Google Ad Manager began experiencing widespread issues affecting a significant subset of users. The disruption lasted approximately 6 hours before Google's engineering teams fully resolved the problem.

During the incident, affected users reported:

  • Error messages: Users encountered unexpected errors when trying to access the platform
  • High latency: Significant delays when loading dashboards and reports
  • Intermittent access: Connections dropping unexpectedly during sessions

Timeline (UTC)

18:00 UTC Incident Start

Issue begins affecting Google Ad Manager users. Error messages and high latency reported.

~20:00 UTC Investigation

Google engineering teams actively investigating. Service partially restored for some users.

00:00 UTC Resolved

Full service restored. Google confirms the problem has been resolved.

Business Impact

Campaign Management Delays

Teams were unable to make urgent campaign adjustments during peak evening hours in Europe and late afternoon in the US.

Reporting Gaps

Some users reported missing or delayed reporting data. Verify your March 24 data for completeness.

Publisher Revenue Impact

Publishers relying on Google Ad Manager may have experienced reduced fill rates or reporting delays during the incident window.

What To Do Now

  • Verify your campaigns are delivering normally today
  • Check March 24 reporting data for any gaps or anomalies
  • Document the incident timeline if you need to explain performance variations to clients
  • Set up status monitoring to catch future issues faster

Context: Google Ads Reliability

This outage is notable because Google Ads maintains exceptional reliability - typically 99.9%+ uptime. While Meta Ads experiences 3-7 incidents per month, Google Ads outages are rare events.

This makes monitoring even more important: when Google does go down, many teams aren't prepared because it happens so infrequently. Being the first to know gives you time to adjust client expectations and reallocate spend if needed.

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