TikTok announced Sunday it has fully restored its services in the U.S. following widespread outages last week. The social media giant attributed the disruption to a severe snowstorm that impacted an Oracle-operated data center, crucial for its U.S. operations.
The company, which boasts over 220 million users in the U.S., confirmed that all issues related to the service interruptions have been resolved. The outages had significantly marred user experiences across the platform.
In a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter), TikTok detailed the extent of the problem:
"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 service disruption occurred shortly after the finalization of a new ownership deal for TikTok's U.S. operations. In January, a U.S.-based investor consortium called TikTok USDS acquired a controlling 80% stake, with ByteDance retaining the remaining 20%.
Following the deal's finalization—which coincided with the snowstorm—users reported various glitches. These included issues with content posting, searching within the app, slower load times, and timeouts. TikTok had previously acknowledged the problems, noting that creators might see zero views on their posts until the issues were resolved, and confirmed it was actively working on recovery.
Amid TikTok's operational challenges and its ownership transition, several rival social networks experienced a surge in user activity. Skylight, a short-video app backed by Mark Cuban and built on the AT protocol, saw its user base jump to more than 380,000 users in the week the deal was finalized. Similarly, Upscrolled, a social network by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, climbed to the second spot in the U.S. social media category on the App Store. The app was downloaded 41,000 times within days of the TikTok deal's finalization, according to analyst firm AppFigures.
