Facebook Ads missing deleted/archived ads.

Closing incident since we reverted the changes that resulted in that archived and deleted ads were not returned.

***What happened:*** 

The root cause of the issue was threefold: on January 2nd, we updated the Facebook Ads API integration to better handle data sources struggling to download data on a low granularity with high complexity calls. A side effect of this change was that archived were not downloaded correctly.

In February, while initially debugging the incident, the Facebook Ads endpoints did not return data that they had previously returned, leading us to escalate the issue with Meta. However, while awaiting a response from Meta, the endpoints changed behavior again - returning data as previously expected, something that increased the time to resolution.

Finally, on March 10th another update aimed at increasing the efficiency and reliability of the Facebook Ads API integration to support customers with very large datasets had the side effect of removing all deleted ads from responses (for most users this resulted in 30 days of missing deleted ads, but affected anyone with newly created sources or sources that requested a backfill during this period).

On March 23rd, we released a update which ensured archived and deleted ads are ingested correctly.

***What we are doing:*** 

As a result of this incident, we are creating additional testing infrastructure to better cover more customer use cases for regression testing before releasing updates to the integrations. We are also implementing improved monitoring for API health so we will notice changes in 3rd Party Endpoints more reliably, minimizing the need for customer escalations. Furthermore, as a mid- to long-term mitigation we are also improving data health measures to detect irregularities on the data field level, that will further compound on these reliability gains.

***What you should do:*** 

*If you notice discrepancies in your Facebook Ads data downloaded January 2 – March 22, please reach out and we will prioritize a backfill for your sources.*

There is an active investigation into a spike in reports regarding missing data for archived or deleted Meta ads. While the system is designed to pull this historical content, a recent shift is currently obstructing these data sources.
Root cause analysis is underway to determine the scale of this Meta limitation.