TikTok, now under new ownership in the United States, announced on Sunday that it has successfully restored services following last week’s outages that affected user experiences. The platform boasts a user base of over 220 million in the U.S.
The company attributed last week’s disruptions to a snowstorm that caused outages at an Oracle-operated data center critical to TikTok’s operations.
“We have fully restored TikTok’s operations after a significant outage caused by winter weather, which impacted a primary data center site in the U.S. run by Oracle. The storm resulted in a power failure, leading to network and storage complications that affected tens of thousands of servers essential for TikTok’s functionality in the U.S. This disruption impacted many core features of the platform, including content posting, discovery, and the real-time display of video likes and view counts,” the company stated in a post on X.
In January, the U.S. concluded a deal to establish a separate entity for TikTok. A consortium of U.S.-based investors, known as TikTok USDS, obtained an 80% controlling interest, leaving the remaining 20% owned by ByteDance.
Following the finalization of this deal—coinciding with the snowstorm—users encountered issues such as glitches in posting, difficulty searching within the app, slower load times, and time-outs. TikTok indicated that some creators might experience zero views on their posts until the issues were resolved. Although the company reported it was actively working to address these problems, outages persisted, leaving users struggling to post content.
The transition of TikTok to this new ownership structure, along with app-related complications and user experience glitches, proved advantageous for some competing social media platforms. Skylight, a short video app backed by Mark Cuban and built on the AT protocol, witnessed a surge in its user base, reaching over 380,000 users in the week following the deal’s conclusion. Additionally, UpScrolled, a social network developed by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, rose through the App Store rankings to secure the second position in the U.S. social media category, accumulating 41,000 downloads within days of the TikTok deal’s finalization, according to data from analyst firm Appfigures.
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