Sharp decrease in clicks/impressions without apparent reason (and food for thought)

Question

Before I dig into some details about this issue, I'll say this:

I've been advertising on this platform for 10+ years. They have changed the name at least twice while I've been with them. This year alone, so far, I've spent here $80k+. Yesterday, I tried the call back option for support and two different agents left me hanging. The first one dropped the call while I was on hold and the second one apparently could not hear me, coincidentally the end of the shift for support hours was quickly approaching. Then, I tried the live chat with a real person.

When I explained the issue and shared a screenshot like this one (below compares to same day the previous week),

the agent looked into my account and after a few minutes replied this:

"...I saw that there are some modification or changes on the campaign (Recommendation applied to the campaigns) in which these changes, causes the campaign to undergo a standard review for 24-48 hours. This review causes the ads to stop deliver. And as of today, it still has newly added entity on the campaign. Having that said, the delivery of the ads will be limited or will stop serving for a few hours"

To that I replied that:

1- I only applied recommendations to add new keywords and trendy keywords and quickly set the keywords bidding to default to the AdGroups bidding, which is something I've done regularly for many years without resulting in any sudden drop of traffic.

2- I made those changes at least a couple of hours after the drop had already started just to see if that resulted in the system refreshing "something" because I couldn't (and still can't) explain the drop in traffic.

They also said this:

"What I am saying is that it is normal to have fluctuation on the traffics and the performance will be depending on the traffics get from the searcher's or depending on the competition on other advertisers. Additionally, since a new recommendation has been applied just today, you may need some time to be able for our system to adjust and to finish the day before evaluating the campaign performance."

...and I explained that it's affecting three different websites in different niches, which means different keywords, etc.

I'll ask here: What are the chances of the competition for three different websites outbidding me so badly, so suddenly, all of them at the same time? What are the chances that users suddenly practically stopped searching for very popular (an unrelated from one website to another) keywords that they have been searching for many years? If you agree that the chances are practically zero, then what is going on?

By the way, if you look at the platform health (https://status.ads.microsoft.com/) they haven't had any issues for a few days.

This is how it's still looking so far today:

Out of 11 enabled campaigns 10 have lost 90%+ of the traffic in the last 20 hours. Only one campaign is still working "normally" and it is for yet another different website.

I just spoke with another agent this morning and they tell me they need more time to look into this.

Is anyone experiencing anything similar?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Update: This chart below shows the clicks for all 11 enabled campaigns combined (for 4 different websites) yesterday (highlighted in yellow) and compared to the same day (Wednesday) last week (dashed line).

It's been 36+ hours and, so far, no plausible explanation as to why this sudden drop.