On November 5, 2024, a massive Google outage occurred: Google Ads advertising accounts were unexpectedly blocked with a message about "system bypass". This affected sites of various CMSs (Khoroshop, OpenCart, and others), which had been successfully operating and advertising on the platform for many years. No changes were made to the accounts. We promptly filed appeals and were able to quickly restore all accounts.


When asked about the real reasons for the mass blocking, Google provided a template response in a letter:


“Thank you for contacting Google Ads support. My name is Dorkita, and I'm happy to help.

I understand that this situation can be frustrating, and I want to explain what happened.

Your accounts have been temporarily suspended because automated systems have detected activity that is designed to circumvent our normal guidelines or policies.

This may include activities such as attempting to run ads that do not normally meet our approval criteria, or manipulating assets to bypass system security measures.

Your accounts are now unblocked, but to prevent this from happening again, I recommend double-checking that all of your ads are fully compliant with Google Ads policies and that no action has been taken to address them.
We hope this information is helpful. In the meantime, if you have any additional questions, do not hesitate to send a reply to this letter.”

 

 

It wouldn't be so sad if there was healthy competition in the search engine market, because in fact Google is a monopolist, this was already recognized by a US court in August 2024. If Google shared the market with the same competitors, there would be other alternatives for consumers and advertisers.


Competition between advertising platforms helps reduce advertising prices, improve tools for advertisers, protect the freedom to choose information sources, ensures transparency and honesty, and forces to focus on business needs and professional requests, and not just on increasing the monopolist's profits.


In our opinion, Google's mass blockings are associated with constant changes in the operation of artificial intelligence algorithms.