Starting early Sunday morning, TikTok’s now under new ownership US arm started breaking down just a couple of days after Oracle & Co took the reins. Its For You page algorithm is suddenly unreliable, while features like comments are failing to load or loading slowly, and publishing new videos seems nearly impossible for many people.

Rumors of censorship targeting anti-ICE protesting or attempting to block discussion of Jeffrey Epstein appear to be misguided (even the governor of California is resharing misinformation now), with problems blocking traffic to all kinds of videos and messages on the service through Monday night.

Read on below for the latest updates about the ongoing TikTok problems.

• TikTok is still struggling in the US due to a “cascading systems failure.”

  After finally announcing the problem started with a power outage at an unnamed partner’s data center, TikTok USDS followed up with an updated statement saying, “While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve together with our data center partner,” and listing some of the bugs users are experiencing. There’s still no ETA for a full fix.

  Image: TikTok USDSJV (X)

• Is New TikTok banning the word “Epstein” in DMs? Not really.

  While tweets from random users, the governor of California, and PopBase claimed TikTok US DMs now censor “Epstein,” testing it from our end showed that its messaging feature bans many innocuous single-word messages, like “test.” Using the convicted sex offender’s name in a sentence, however, goes through unbanned.

• TikTok blames its US problems on a power outage

  Image: The Verge

  TikTok says a power outage is causing ongoing issues and outages that started in the US early Sunday morning. In an email to The Verge, TikTok USDS spokesperson Jamie Favazza pointed to a statement posted to the joint venture’s newly-created X account, which says the company has been “working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate.”

  On Sunday, many US users, including some of us here at The Verge, reported not being able to upload videos to TikTok or see most new videos, including new videos uploaded successfully by users from outside the US. Others said that their algorithm appeared to “reset,” though it’s unclear if that’s linked to the power outage, too.

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• TikTok USA is broken

  Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

• TikTok is breaking down.

  If the mobile app loads, it’s not consistently showing comments or other features, and the algorithm managing the For You page doesn’t feel like it’s working correctly.

  Screenshot: Downdetector

• What TikTok’s new owners mean for your feed

  Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

  TikTok is officially under new ownership in the US, and that could spell big changes for the video-sharing app. On January 22nd, ByteDance – TikTok’s Chinese parent company — and a group of investors closed a $14 billion deal to spin off the platform’s US operations, introducing a new slate of American executives.

  The Silver Lake investment firm, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and the cloud giant Oracle will each have 15 percent stakes in the new TikTok US Data Security (USDS) Joint Venture LLC. ByteDance will still hold a 19.9 percent stake in the company, in line with the divest-or-ban law that went into effect last year — though the deal was pushed through with help from President Donald Trump in persistent disregard of the law.

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