Yahoo Ad System Crashes, Angering Advertisers in the Process

It appears that after a scheduled weekend upgrade to Yahoo! Search Marketing's (formerly known as Overture) ad system, it has experienced nothing but problems since. According to MarketingVOX's report, "the system first slowed to a crawl, and then went belly up on Monday, preventing marketers from making changes to their campaigns, accessing their accounts and, in many cases, even having their ads run at all." Even Yahoo's own support people don't know what is going on. That's pretty scary! In fact, here is their response:

Yahoo! Search Marketing initiated a systems upgrade this past weekend to lay the groundwork for performance and availability improvements that our advertisers will see over the coming months. During this process, we encountered some unexpected issues that affected advertisers' ability to access their accounts.

Our number one priority right now is to restore service for our advertisers, so we are working around the clock to resolve this as quickly as possible.

This is not sitting well with advertisers and has angered many of them who have not been able to successfully manage their accounts since the upgrade. One claims that they have received one tenth of the usual traffic they receive. Another claimed that their traffic was 3 times greater than a typical weekend for them. In fact their ad spend increased by close to $20,000 in less than 3 days. One advertiser is even considering legal action.

I can feel their pain. My online merchant processing company performed an upgrade a few months back that caused all of us untold nightmares. I hate upgrades because they have that tendency to fail. Hopefully Yahoo! can get things back to order and quick. Maybe they will be really nice and extend credit to advertisers for the dis-functionality of their system. I am sure the requests are already pouring in.