This is a true story about how Meta (Facebook) disabled our customers’ personal and business Ad accounts permanently and what you need to do next if you want to continue advertising. Meta can stop your advertising without giving you a reason, explaining what you did wrong, or giving you a chance to make things right.
While trying to contact Meta support, you can find yourself communicating with a robot and even so, waiting hours for the reply so it looks like human interaction. When you finally get reach of a real live person, their advice is to break their own rules and create a new Meta account.
Usual response from Facebook support:
We reviewed your Facebook account and determined that access to advertising features was incorrectly disabled. We’ve reinstated your access to advertising. Any ads that were affected will return to their previous status.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Thanks,
The Facebook Business Team
Some of the accounts we manage were blocked before, multiple Ads were rejected, and some accounts got warnings. We do a lot of advertising for our clients, and mistakes were made before and corrected, especially in regulated industries where rules are tight. When you deal with Google Ads, if you make a mistake or break some policy, unlike Meta they will give you a reason why your Ads got rejected and you waste no time.
Facebook decided to take a different approach, they permanently disabled the account without notice
Hi ******,
After further review of your Facebook account, we found you didn’t comply with our Advertising Policies (https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads) or other standards. You will no longer be allowed to advertise and your access to features for managing ad and business accounts will remain limited.
The Facebook Business Team
These error messages started to appear in the Facebook Ads Manager:
Ad Account Disabled
This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled. You can’t use it to run ads.
On the Campaigns page :
facebook.com/adsmanager/manage/campaigns?act=****
Ad Account Disabled
You can’t use this account to run ads. Its ads have stopped running and some of its advertising assets are also disabled.
On the Account Quality page:
facebook.com/accountquality/***/***
Ad Account Disabled
This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled because your Facebook account is restricted from advertising.
Restrictions
Can’t create or run ads
Can’t use or share audiences
Can’t use Facebook pixel, offline event sets or custom conversions
Can’t use app SDKs to send app events
Disabled Assets
Audiences
Pixels
Offline event sets
Custom conversions
How to proceed?
If you get blocked too many times, even by a mistake of machine learning of Facebook’s AI, your account will be disabled and Facebook staff is not authorized to make it right. Their advice is to create a new account, Ads account on the affected account is supposedly unrecoverable.
After another appeal, filling out the forms a new case was made. No response for a week. No response for a month. No response to anything for three months, … We tried every publicly available way to get in touch with Meta (Facebook) support directly on behalf of our client. Finally, an e-mail came explaining that our account was permanently blocked and we should create another account.
Assuming it was just a badly trained support staff, we reached out to colleagues from the industry. Almost everyone confirmed having the same experience and non of them liked the idea they could be switched off anytime Facebook feels like it.
Ironically small businesses are begging Meta’s support chat bot to continue spending money on their platform, as a result they get suspended, disabled, ignored, and advised to break the rules. Meanwhile, Russians tried to supposedly hijack elections using Facebook and were allowed to advertise stupidly insane and offensive stuff again and again.
If you are getting the following message in your inbox every time you appeal, it is just a robot response, don’t be fooled.
Hello ****, Thanks for reaching out to us. We’ve reactivated your advertising account and you should now be able to create new ads and manage your existing ones. If you have a campaign that’s currently stopped, the ads within the campaign can’t be restarted until the campaign is active again. To turn your ads on:
1. Go to your Ads Manager
2. Find the ad you want to turn on or off
3. In the Status column, use the switch to change the status to on or off
Sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused.Thanks for your understanding. How was your appeals experience? Give us your feedback to help us do better. Thanks,
The Facebook Ads Team
Lessons learned
Don’t put all your apples into one basket with Facebook, learn how to use other platforms so your business is not solely dependent on Facebook advertising. Be prepared that all the advertising history, setups, verifications, pixels, and catalogs you made on the platform can be gone or disabled tomorrow.
Learn to use proven platforms like Google Ads, where you can build sustainable advertising campaigns and you will be treated with respect. We have used Google Ads since the very beginning of online Ads. They were never rude, never ignored us, and always gave us an explanation of why the banner or text ad was rejected. Their measurements are accurate and fair.
While Facebook Ads appear cheaper to run, the price is not everything. The effort, time invested and lengthy training are not worth it if you get banned and you never know when and what for.
If you have your own experience with Facebook, please share it in the comments.
The solution to continue with advertising
After 9 months of waiting, we advised our client to give up. Asked their managers to close their personal accounts and create new ones. This is to avoid duplicate accounts as it is against Meta’s policy to have more than one personal account.
With new personal accounts, new business accounts were created and they still work to this day. Ironically running the same ads as before being banned.
10 Responses
My problems with this issue are as follows:
1. No details are available from Facebook as to why my account got disabled. How am I supposed to correct an issue if I don’t know what the issue is? I believe the issue (i.e. a bug) is with Facebook, not me, but I just don’t know.
2. Lack of option to discuss this issue with an actual human being.
3. The very high likelihood that instead of resolving the issue, the ‘best’ advice I’d get from Facebook would be to open a new account.
———–
IMHO these 3 issues amount to negligence (an unacceptably low standard of quality or care) on the part of Facebook.
This issue could be affecting 100s if not 1000s of people worldwide, causing stress and business disruption.
**I’m not the litigious type, but I wonder if this might interest legal firms (presumably in the U.S.) to pursue as a class action?**
Class actions against Facebook and other large tech firms are not without precedent.
Yes, this is crazy irritating on many levels.
My Facebook account (that I’ve had since 2007) has fallen victim to this issue about a year ago after I very legitimately attempted to change and verify my Facebook account address/location details because I’ve moved countries (Australia to the UK).
My Facebook account is now ‘permanently disabled’ from being able to run paid adverts.
As annoying as this was, I could tolerate it, because I don’t need to run paid ads very often, and if/when I do, one of my associates can do it on my behalf.
BUT this has now become a much bigger problem because my Fb account is associated as the (one and only) administrator with a mobile app for the purpose of allowing authentication using Facebook.
Facebook wants me to re-verify the business entity associated with the app, but it looks like my Facebook account is locked out of being able to perform the necessary verification steps… and therefore the Facebook authentication option is now broken in the associated app.
Same thing. But I think I really posted things against the rules. But I don’t know, sometimes to reach success I think you may really break the rules. I am not that bad. I just want success.
This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled because it didn’t comply with our Advertising policies affecting business assets or other standards, such as having too many ads rejected, attempting to circumvent our ad review process, participating in fraudulent behavior, or associating with untrustworthy accounts. Learn more. Too much time has passed since this account was disabled, so this decision can’t be reviewed.
Hi. I have the same thing that was happened to me. But i cant open a new account too. Facebook understand thats me and blocked me again. What shoul i do. To get my business ads again?
Hi, did you ever find a way to open a new account with Facebook with a working ads account?
Same experience here and I’m going to have to make a new account. Thanks for making this article, I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s experienced this.
So frustrating. Same thing just happened to me. I have been told to create a new FB page to run my ads from but it’s like starting from scratch – no data, no likes, no nothing! Looking for alternatives to FB Ads.
Same thing happened to me I had a business back 10 years ago until a tragedy hit us and had to go to full time work. Did a couple of ads. nothing else since. I started my business up just last July and found someone I did not know as ad admin. and no way to remove them cause as facebook says I am not the ad manager. But everything shows them I am the owner and only one on my account. They do not care no way to remove them only the ad manager can. Also my ad account is now I find Advertising Access Permanently Restricted.
and information that shows is;
We noticed unusual activity on your account and were unable to confirm your identity. To help ensure the security of our community, your advertising access was permanently restricted. You’ll no longer be able to use Facebook products to advertise.
And days emailing some guy that doesn’t care and just says its permanent. and no way I can verify who I am or get that person off my account!!!!
oh and note all my past ads were paid in good faith (which was back in 2006). no ad violations, no negative responses.. NOTHING..
Plus I checked and that new ad manager shows no ads at all.
so I am disabled only because they were unable to confirm your identity. No emails saying hey ad manager has changed. No hey we need to identify you. or hey we are going to disable your ad account.
And because it is disabled no way to prove who I am.
same thing happened with me guys actually my account was hacked by someone and facebook permenentaly disable my account. some balance are there arount 1k can i use this balance? Worst Facebook Ad Policy
Same things just happened with me right now this is 2nd time with me and this time i have 5000 rupees in my prepaid account and now I’m just frusted with Facebook I don’t know what i have to do very disappointed