Microsoft Advertising Outage,
September 16, 2026
Merchant Center was unreachable for 5 hours 23 minutes. It is the sixth Microsoft Advertising incident this month, and the only one Microsoft has marked fixed.
Status: resolved
Microsoft confirmed the Merchant Center fix at 13:14 UTC on September 16. If you are reading this during a live problem, it is a different one - check the live Microsoft Advertising status page.
What happened
Between September 15 at 21:00 UTC and September 16 at 02:23 UTC, some advertisers saw slow loading times or blank pages when opening the Microsoft Merchant Center UI. Microsoft classified the severity as "Impacted" and closed the incident with a note that engineering had restored all Merchant Center functionality.
Duration: 5 hours 23 minutes of impact. Microsoft published the resolution roughly 11 hours after the problem ended.
Merchant Center is where product feeds live. If your feed upload or a scheduled fetch fell in that window, check it completed - a blank UI and a failed feed pull look identical from the outside, which is to say they look like nothing at all.
The detail Microsoft did not connect
Microsoft filed two separate notices that night. The Merchant Center outage started at September 15, 21:00 UTC. A Share of Voice data delay started at September 15, 21:00 UTC.
Identical start timestamps, to the minute, reported as unrelated events. One has been closed. The other is still open. We are not claiming a shared root cause - Microsoft has not published one - but two systems failing at the same second is worth knowing about if you are reconciling that night's data.
Six incidents in 16 days
| Started (UTC) | Incident | Microsoft says fixed |
|---|---|---|
| Sep 1, 17:57 | Reporting data delayed | No |
| Sep 2, 01:02 | Quality Score delayed (up to 77h) | No |
| Sep 2, 14:02 | Share of Voice delayed | No |
| Sep 13, 22:00 | Offline Conversions delayed | No |
| Sep 15, 21:00 | Share of Voice delayed | No |
| Sep 15, 21:00 | Merchant Center UI unreachable | Yes |
Source: AdStatus monitoring of status.ads.microsoft.com, September 1-16, 2026.
Five of the six are still marked "Is Fixed: No" on Microsoft's own status page. That does not necessarily mean your data is still stale - Microsoft's data-delay notices frequently never receive a closing update, so the open state is partly a reporting habit rather than a live fault.
But it does mean you cannot use Microsoft's status page to answer "is my reporting trustworthy right now?" The page will tell you something started. It will rarely tell you it stopped.
Why this keeps being a reporting story
Every Microsoft notice this month carried the same sentence: "This is only affecting the reporting and there is no impact on the Ad delivery." Your ads ran. Your numbers were wrong.
That is the harder failure to notice, and the more expensive one. A delivery outage is visible within the hour because spend stops. A 77-hour Quality Score delay means bid decisions made on Wednesday used Sunday's data, and nothing in the interface says so.
We found the same pattern in March 2026, when all seven Microsoft incidents that month were data delays and none were outages. Six months on, the delay windows have got longer.
What to check
- Merchant Center feed uploads scheduled between 21:00 UTC Sep 15 and 02:23 UTC Sep 16 - confirm they completed rather than silently failing.
- Share of Voice figures for Sep 15-16 and Sep 2-3. Two separate delays, each up to 21 hours.
- Any automated rule reading Microsoft Quality Score in early September. A 77-hour delay is long enough for a rule to fire three times on the same stale value.
- Offline conversion imports from Sep 13 onward, especially for longer sales cycles.
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