When Pinterest Ads goes down, do three things first: confirm the outage is on their side, protect whatever the outage is breaking in your store, and tell affected customers before they find out the hard way. This playbook walks through each step for Pinterest Ads specifically.
How do I confirm Pinterest Ads is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Pinterest Ads status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Pinterest Ads's own status page at www.pinterest.com/. If the official page still shows green, do not assume you are wrong: vendors often acknowledge incidents well after they start. If both look clean, the problem is more likely your store's configuration or a specific integration.
What does a Pinterest Ads outage look like?
- Pinterest Ads Manager fails to load or errors on campaign edits
- Referral traffic from pinterest.com drops sharply in analytics
- Catalog feed ingestion fails or products show as unprocessed
- Conversions stop appearing in Pinterest reporting while store orders continue
- Campaigns show active status but little or no delivery
What breaks in your store
An outage can affect the Pinterest Ads Manager, ad serving, catalog feed ingestion, or conversion tracking. If serving breaks, referral traffic from pinterest.com drops and campaigns underdeliver; if the Ads Manager or API is down, ads keep running but you cannot adjust them, which matters mid-promotion. Catalog feed failures leave shopping ads showing outdated prices or out-of-stock items, and tag outages make campaigns look unprofitable because purchases stop being attributed even though sales continue.
For context, Pinterest Ads has had no major incidents in the last 90 days of StatusBird's independent monitoring (100.0% availability), so a real outage is unusual. That makes it easy to mistake one for a problem on your end, which is why confirming first matters.
What to do during the outage
- Compare store orders against Pinterest-reported conversions to distinguish a tracking failure from a real sales drop.
- Avoid restructuring campaigns during the outage, since edits may not save correctly and can disrupt optimization.
- Pause any promotion-specific ads via the API or bulk editor if pricing has changed and the feed is not updating.
- Reallocate urgent short-term budget to channels that are serving normally if delivery is confirmed down.
- Recheck catalog feed status after recovery and force a manual feed refresh so prices and stock resync.
Frequently asked questions
Pinterest is showing zero conversions today but my sales look normal. What happened?
That pattern points to a Pinterest Tag or Conversions API tracking failure rather than an ads problem. Your campaigns likely kept serving; Pinterest just could not record the purchases. Some of the data may backfill, but expect a permanent attribution gap for the outage window and judge that day's performance by store revenue instead.
My Pinterest shopping ads are showing old sale prices. Can I stop them?
If the catalog feed is failing to ingest, Pinterest keeps serving the last synced product data. Pause the affected shopping campaigns if the price mismatch could create customer complaints, then trigger a manual feed refresh once Pinterest recovers and confirm prices updated before unpausing.
After the outage
Once Pinterest Ads recovers, verify the affected workflows end to end rather than trusting the status page. Note the start and end times while they are fresh: if you are on a paid Pinterest Ads plan with an SLA, documented downtime is what a service credit claim is built on. See how to claim SLA credits for the process.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks Pinterest Ads's status every 2 minutes, around the clock, independently of the vendor. The availability figure counts major and critical outages only; minor degradation is excluded so numbers are not skewed by vendors that report small blips near-continuously. Grades run from A+ to F. See the live numbers on the Pinterest Ads reliability page and current status on the Pinterest Ads status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Pinterest Ads and 83 other services online stores depend on, plus your own storefront, every 2 minutes. When something goes down you get an SMS, email, or Slack alert with plain-English context, usually before the official status page catches up. Start monitoring free, no card required for the free plan.