TikTok said it has restored normal service in the United States after outages last week disrupted core features for millions of users, blaming a winter snowstorm that knocked out power at a key Oracle-operated data center supporting its US operations.
Outage Tied To Winter Storm
In a statement posted on X on Sunday, TikTok said a primary US data center operated by Oracle lost power due to severe winter weather. The outage caused network and storage failures that affected tens of thousands of servers used to run TikTok in the US.
The company said the incident disrupted a wide range of features, including content posting, discovery, and the real-time display of video likes and view counts.
User Impact And Ongoing Issues
The disruption followed the finalization of TikTok’s US ownership restructuring in January. As the deal closed, users began reporting problems with posting videos, searching within the app, slow load times, and frequent time-outs.
TikTok acknowledged that some creators were seeing zero views on newly posted content while systems were degraded. Although the company said it was working to resolve the issues, outages and glitches persisted for several days before service was fully restored.
TikTok has more than 220 million users in the United States.
New US Ownership Structure
The service interruption coincided with the creation of a new US-based entity for TikTok. Under the finalized agreement, a US investor consortium known as TikTok USDS acquired an 80% controlling stake in the platform’s US operations. The remaining 20% is held by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.
Competitors See Short-Term Gains
The outages and ownership transition appeared to benefit rival social platforms. Skylight, a Mark Cuban-backed short video service built on the AT protocol, reported its user base grew to more than 380,000 during the week the TikTok deal was finalized.
Another platform, UpScrolled, created by technologist Issam Hijazi, climbed to second place in the US App Store’s social media category. According to Appfigures, the app was downloaded about 41,000 times within days of the TikTok deal’s completion.
Service Restored
TikTok said the affected data center has since been brought back online and that the platform is operating normally. The company did not indicate whether additional infrastructure changes would be made to prevent similar outages in the future.
Featured image credits: Plann
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