When David Herrmann co-founded a private Facebook group last March for advertisers on the social network, he thought it might provide a place for people to share thoughts on the industry and discuss best practices.
But in the past five months, the “Facebook & Instagram Pro Ad Buyers Industry Group” has taken on another purpose: Emotional support. Herrmann’s group has become a place to commiserate about the state of Facebook Ads Manager, the software system used to run advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Ads Manager is crashing with regularity, according to interviews with numerous advertisers. The outages, which can last for hours at a time and make it impossible to start a new ad campaign or manage an existing one, seem to happen every month, they say.