It’s a scary thing when you log into Adsense to check your earnings and see a negative current balance. This was what I saw when I checked by balance on September 5. It was the first time seeing something like this happen. At first I thought something went wrong and Adsense decided to take back some money leaving a negative value. But I notice the balance was what it should have been but as a negative value.
I looked into it further and notice that even my most recent payment was showing a negative balance as well. This is really scary thing to see. After all a lot of work goes into a website and maintaining it, so every income source counts.
Why am I seeing a Negative Balance?
In this case it seems that Adsense was experiencing a bug that resulted in me and other publishers seeing a negative value for their current balance and most recent payment. So there is nothing to worry about. The extent of the issue is not know but quite a few publishers were experiencing the issue. I decided to record the issue here as it may happen again in the future or to new publishers. If it does then at least I can save you some worry in thinking something is wrong when it’s not. There has also been confirmation from Google by other publishers that this is in fact an issue.
Per Adsense Terms and conditions I cant show you my actual earnings.
How to know if I have the same issue?
It’s easy to verify if you are experiencing the same issue. Seeing the error is only happening on the front end of Adsense go ahead and go into payments and you will see that the balance is displayed and your last set of payments and that no deduction was made. If a deduction was made it would be visible under payments.So you see you are good and there is nothing to worry about and in the future you can use this to know if what you are seeing is an error.
What can I do about it?
Well Google is already aware so there is nothing you can do for now. If you want to report the issue simply click on help in the upper right of the screen and click on send feedback. When you do this a message will be sent to Google you can even highlight the section of the screen where the error is and leave a message to bring the error to their attention. Simple its done.
Update
Today is September 6 and Google has already fixed the issue and my balance is now showing as it should. So the problem is fixed and things are back to normal.
So guys if you are having this issue please share your experience below. I am sure you are relieved to find out that its just a Google error, after all when things like these happen it can be frightening considering that you can’t always tell its an error as there is no notice.
