Two threads from the weekend have major complaints about the recent Microsoft adCenter maintenance that took place over the weekend.
A WebmasterWorld and Microsoft Advertising thread have the complaints.
In short, it seems like the "scheduled" maintenance took many advertisers by surprise and when the maintenance window was complete, the reporting and tools did not update as quickly as advertisers would have liked.
One advertiser said:
If it was 'scheduled' then why on earth don't they give their customers some notice about this? I might need to make some essential changes and I'm completely stuck - VERY VERY BAD ADCENTER!
Another advertiser said:
adCenter is back up however... reporting is 9 hours behind so I don't know what I've spent so far today (way too much already for the period reported), I can't change the default bids ("adCenter has encountered an error" message...) and the ads for my keywords that I'm bidding top dollar on took a nose dive way to the bottom of the page if that and I'm not doubling my bids just to get the same position, my business suffered way too many loses as it is due to the lag in reporting. What else is going to go wrong that we haven't discovered yet?
I guess Microsoft will live and learn from this. I am not sure if Microsoft sent out notice prior to the maintenance or not. I do know these customer complaints are going unanswered at the moment.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Microsoft Advertising.
Update: A Microsoft spokesperson did in fact tell me they did send out alerts through multiple channels about this scheduled maintenance. Here is their statement:
I saw your story yesterday about the adCenter maintenance and some issues people were having. I wanted you to know that yes, the maintenance that happened was scheduled. We posted two blogs on March 8th to the adCenter blog and also the API blog alerting folks to the issue. In addition to the blogs, there were UI alerts and a variety of other alerts sent by us and Yahoo. Of course, we regret any inconvenience the brief outage may have caused customers and welcome feedback as to how to help better prepare them next time.
