TikTok Data Center Outage Triggers Trust Crisis for New US Owners

TikTok is currently experiencing a widespread service outage in the US, causing disruptions for millions of users only a few days after the company officially transferred control of its American business to a group of majority-US investors.

The technical issues led many TikTok users to speculate about whether the app’s new owners were intentionally suppressing videos about political topics, particularly content related to recent federal immigration operations in Minnesota. TikTok has denied the allegations, attributing the problems to a power outage.

TikTok users began reporting on Sunday that they were having trouble uploading videos to the app as well as viewing content that had already been posted on the platform. Others said that while they could upload videos, they were receiving far fewer views and engagement than usual.

According to Downdetector, which tracks real-time service disruptions, a surge of users began reporting outages on TikTok starting early yesterday morning in the US. “Our data suggests that services are not yet fully restored for all users,” reads an alert Downdetector shared on Monday.

Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Law, said in a Bluesky post that he had “recorded a video on TikTok about why DHS’s arguments for the power to enter homes without judicial warrants in immigration cases are bunk. Nine hours later, TikTok still says my video is ‘under review,’ and can’t be shared.”

The technical glitches have also attracted the attention of US senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “I know it's hard to track all the threats to democracy out there right now, but this is at the top of the list,” Murphy wrote in a Bluesky post. When reached for comment, Deni Kemper, a spokesperson for Murphy, told WIRED that his office did not “have anything to share beyond the senator’s tweet.”

In a post from a new X account created by the app’s US-controlled entity, TikTok said the service disruption was caused by “a power outage at a US data center.” A TikTok spokesperson confirmed the account’s authenticity to WIRED.

When asked about user claims that content was being censored on the platform, the spokesperson said it would be inaccurate to describe the problem as anything other than a technical issue that the company has publicly confirmed on X.

The spokesperson added that new TikTok posts may temporarily take longer to publish and be circulated by the app’s recommendation algorithm. TikTok says it’s working with its data center partner to restore service as quickly as possible, but there’s currently no estimate for when the app will be fully functional again.

Oracle, which owns 15 percent of TikTok's new US entity, has hosted the app’s US user data since 2022. The company initially declined to comment on the outage. It’s unclear if it may be related to a powerful winter storm sweeping across large parts of the US, which has knocked out electricity for hundreds of thousands of Americans.

In a statement sent to WIRED Tuesday, Oracle spokesperson Michael Egbert said that “Over the weekend, an Oracle data center experienced a temporary weather-related power outage which impacted TikTok. The challenges US TikTok users may be experiencing are the result of technical issues that followed the power outage, which Oracle and TikTok are working to quickly resolve."

TikTok completed transferring ownership of its US operations last week. On Thursday, the company announced that it has established TikTok USDS Joint Venture, a corporate entity intended to bring the app into compliance with a 2024 law requiring TikTok to divest from its Chinese ownership. The law was upheld by the US Supreme Court, but its enforcement was repeatedly postponed by the Trump administration until last week.