TikTok says its services are restored after the outage
TikTok, which is under new ownership in the U.S., said Sunday that it has restored service after outages last week that marred user experiences. The social network has over 220 million users in the U.S.
The company blamed last week’s snowstorm, which caused an outage at an Oracle-operated data center responsible for TikTok operations.
“We have successfully restored TikTok back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary U.S. data center site operated by Oracle. The winter storm led to a power outage which caused network and storage issues at the site and impacted tens of thousands of servers that help keep TikTok running in the U.S. This affected many of TikTok’s core features—from content posting and discovery to the real-time display of video likes and view counts,” the company said in a post on X.
In January, the U.S. finalized the deal to create a separate entity for TikTok. A U.S.-based investor consortium called TikTok USDS took a controlling 80% stake, with the remaining 20% ownership held by ByteDance.
Following the deal finalization — which coincided with the snowstorm — users experienced glitches in features like posting, searching within the app, slower load times, and time-outs. TikTok noted that creators might see zero views on their posts until the problem was resolved. Later, the company said that it was working on solving the issue, but outages persisted, and users faced problems with posting content.
TikTok’s transition to a new ownership structure, paired with app snafus and user experience glitches, was beneficial for some other social networks. The Mark Cuban-backed short video app Skylight, which is built on the AT protocol, saw its user base soar to more than 380,000 users in the week the deal was finalized. Upscrolled, a social network by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, also climbed in App Store rankings to reach the second spot in the social media category in the U.S. The app was downloaded 41,000 times within days of the TikTok deal’s finalization, according to analyst firm AppFigures.
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Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.
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