There appears to be a major glitch happening in Google AdWords right now that is preventing a large number of account holders in Australia and New Zealand from accessing their campaigns.

It all started about 8pm last night – I had my MCC account loaded and I tried to shift beween client accounts when I found I couldn’t get the campaigns to load. I tried to shift back to the client I was working on previously and found I couldn’t get their campaigns to load either.

So I tried several other client accounts, clicking on the campaigns tab – with the same result – a rolling *loading* icon, which eventually resolves to a blank screen where the campaign details should be (see image).

AdWords campaigns failing to load

So I logged out of my MCC account and tried to log in to an individual account, only to receive the same error. I could login to the accounts, but could not view any campaigns. I took to Twitter and asked if anyone else was having trouble and so far it seems as though only account holders in Australia and New Zealand are affected.

Google emailed an announcement this week, advising that account holders in Asia Pacific were being moved from Google Ireland to Google Singapore for billing purposes (can you say tax break?), so I have a sneaking suspicion that this outage is related.

But this is mission critical stuff – the only way for my clients to control their AdWords accounts right now is to remove their credit card details! At the time of publishing this post, it’s been 17 hours without campaign access to my client accounts and my clients are getting antsy. I have a good mind to demand all click costs during this outage be reimbursed to their accounts.

The other problem is that I can’t grade assignments of my PPC students at Search Engine College because I can’t see their accounts to grade them! I’ve tried contacting Google via Twitter and through the AdWords Support team, but I’m yet to hear back.

Regardless, I’ll be interested in hearing Google’s excuses for this one. I’ll keep tabs on the length of the outage and report back when I know more.

Are you having trouble accessing your accounts right now? Please leave a comment if you are.

Postscript: Paul from AdWords California was kind enough to email me (and comment on this post) to confirm the issue and let me know they were working on it. Thankfully, it was resolved about 2 hours after this post was published. Turns out it was simply a bug in the system. Not sure if they got it ironed out completely, because I had trouble accessing the Billing tab in my MCC account this morning, but at least I can edit client accounts now.

Spread the joy!