On 6 August, Google Merchant Centre experienced an outage that lasted more than three days, affecting advertisers and merchants using the platform to manage their product listings. Google acknowledged the issue later that day and said it was investigating, but initially provided no information about what had caused the disruption or which features were affected. The outage was eventually resolved on 9 August, with Google’s Merchant Centre Status Dashboard reporting a total duration of three days and two hours.
The Impact of the Merchant Centre Outage
Google Merchant Centre is the key mechanism for several important Google commerce products, including:
- Google Shopping – Product listings rely on Merchant Centre data to appear in Shopping results
- Performance Max – Campaigns use product feeds to serve ads across Google’s inventory
- Free product listings – Organic product visibility also depends on accurate Merchant Centre information
During the outage, advertisers reported problems synchronising product feeds, errors appearing in Merchant Centre, and products disappearing from the Shopping tab. Some Shopping campaigns also stopped serving.
This can have a direct commercial impact. When product data becomes unavailable or stale, Performance Max asset groups and dynamic ads activity can be affected. Automated bidding was also disrupted because Google’s systems rely on current campaign and product signals to make optimisation decisions.
Although functionality was restored after a few days, some campaigns continued to be impacted by the outage. Some advertisers reported seeing unusual spending even after the outage ended. This is probably because the platform was processing fresh data. This is an important reminder when an ad platform experiences a technical issue. If your ads are under-performing after an outage, it doesn’t mean your strategy isn’t working; it could just be that the system is readjusting after using incomplete or outdated data.
What to Do During a Merchant Centre Outage
If another major Merchant Centre outage occurs, our advice is to take a cautious approach. Here’s what our team focuses on:
- Reviewing dependent campaigns – Potentially pausing Performance Max or Shopping campaigns if product listings are unavailable or broken
- Avoiding unnecessary feed changes – Don’t start editing or re-uploading product feeds to try to fix what may be a platform-side problem
- Monitoring accounts – Watch for changes in error messages and product approval statuses
- Checking wider performance – Looking at your website’s analytics to establish whether organic and social traffic are still normal
- Waiting for confirmation – Allowing Google to restore normal operations before making any significant changes or switching campaigns back on.
We know the temptation during an outage is to act and make changes. However, that can make things worse if the underlying problem is Google Merchant Centre itself, and temporary glitches can also result in incorrect feed errors or product disapprovals when products are repeatedly reprocessed.
The Final Word
The Merchant Centre outage is a reminder that, if campaigns depend on a product feed, problems further up the infrastructure can quickly affect advertising performance. It’s best to monitor platform-level issues along with campaign performance and make decisions based on the big picture rather than reacting to a single unusual day.
If you’d like help understanding your advertising performance or how your campaigns are affected by platform issues, we’d love to chat. Feel free to get in touch.