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Meta burned through 117% of my daily budget in 1 hour – System bug?
Posted by on February 28, 2026 at 1:13 amNeed some help/perspective here – this is a delivery bug, right?
I launched two campaigns with €55 daily budgets:
**Campaign 1 (Feb 27):**
– Launched at 14:00
– By 15:00: €64 spent (117% of daily budget in ONE HOUR)
– CPM spiked to €171
**Campaign 2 (Feb 28):**
– Launched at 00:00
– By 01:30: €45 spent (82% of daily budget in 90 minutes)
– Similar CPM anomalies
I've run hundreds of campaigns on this account and have NEVER seen budget acceleration like this. Usually Meta paces the daily budget relatively evenly throughout the day.
The CPMs during these hours were also abnormally high compared to my account averages.
Already submitted a support case requesting a technical review and potential refund, but wanted to check – has anyone else experienced this recently?
Is this some new "learning phase" behavior or does this look like a legitimate system error?
Down €150 total from these two campaigns. 😅
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1 Reply
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Meta can spend up to 125% of your daily budget, and new campaigns often front-load spend during learning. The high CPM likely came from aggressive early auction testing on a small budget, not a system error.
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