It seems that Microsoft has failed to learn from its respective competitor's mistakes and examples. Last week, a bug in Google Adwords costed advertisers incredibly high CPCs and Google remained tight-lipped. Then earlier this week a similar glitch at Yahoo was costing advertisers as much as $42,000, but Yahoo! reached out and owed up for its folly. Now, Microsoft's AdCenter is experiencing a similar problem, and they seem to be being impersonally cold about it. As Search Engine Round Table reports:

Reported this morning at WebmasterWorld, was a bug where advertisers reports are showing that they are being seriously overcharged for many of their keywords.

I have a bid. of $0.30 and i was charged on a click for $16.

So this user was overcharged by about 500%.

They charged me $5.10/click on something that is clearly set at $0.44/click!

My daily spend increased almost 10-fold from $140 to over $1350 yesterday!

The official adCenter representative, adCenterEU, confirmed this issue saying:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

This is a known issue and our support team are working on analysing the root cause and providing a solution.

We'll post back when we have more news.

Thanks for your patience.

Regards

adCenterEU

What is most disappointing about this is Microsoft's impersonal corporate response. When this happened to Yahoo, the official Yahoo! Search Marketing Representative reached out to those who might not be able to wait for the situation to reverse itself. In the age of user generated content and Web 2.0, that is precisely the kind of organic relationship that the consumer is going to demand, and those who can provide it will surely flourish.