Facebook hit with huge ad problems ahead of scramble for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals

Issues make companies unable to market ahead of the biggest shopping day of the year

A Facebook sign is seen during the China Digital Entertainment Expo and Conference, 3 August 2018 (Reuters)

Facebook has been hit by major problems with its ad platform right as the biggest shopping days of the year approach.

The company said there had been significant issues with uploading ads that meant that users were unable to post any marketing content.

And the issues happened just days before Black Friday and then Cyber Monday, as users search for the best deals and advertisers rush to get their attention.

Facebook said that the problems were now fixed but that things might have taken a while to get back to normal. It might be working slower than usual, it said.

Email inboxes as well as social networks like Facebook are currently being flooded with ads from companies desperate to take some of the huge amounts of money that are spent after Thanksgiving, over Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the weekend in between.

Companies that want to do so using Facebook have to upload their ads and set them up so they can be inserted into people's News Feeds. But as they tried to do so, they ran into the problems that meant the campaigns could not be posted.

Facebook said that live campaigns that were already running should not have been affected by the problems. But advertisers ran into issues both creating new campaigns and making changes to old ones, it said.