TikTok, under new ownership in the United States, said Sunday that it had restored its services following an outage last week that damaged the user experience. The social network has more than 220 million users in the United States.
The company blamed last week’s snowstorm, which caused an outage at an Oracle-operated data center that handles TikTok operations.
“We were successful in restoring TikTok to normal after winter weather brought down a major U.S. data center site operated by Oracle. The winter storm caused outages, causing network and storage issues on the site and impacting tens of thousands of servers that help keep TikTok running in the U.S. This impacted many of TikTok’s core functions, from content publishing and discovery to real-time display of video likes and views,” the company said in a post on X.
In January, the United States finalized a deal to create a separate entity for TikTok. A consortium of US-based investors called TikTok USDS acquired an 80% controlling stake, with the remaining 20% ownership held by ByteDance.
After the deal closed at the same time as the snowstorm, users experienced glitches in features like posting, in-app search, slow load times, and timeouts. TikTok noted that creators may receive no views on their posts at all until the issue is resolved. The company later stated that it was working to resolve the issue, but the service interruption continued and users experienced problems posting content.
TikTok’s transition to a new ownership structure, combined with app issues and user experience glitches, has been beneficial to some other social networks. Skylight, the Mark Cuban-backed short-form video app built on the AT protocol, saw its user base surge to more than 380,000 the week the deal closed. Upscrolled, a social network created by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, also rose in the App Store rankings, reaching second place in the U.S. social media category. The app was downloaded 41,000 times in the days after the TikTok transaction was completed, according to analytics firm AppFigures.
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