TikTok is back online after a week-long technical nightmare that exposed the fragility of its newly restructured U.S. operations. The short-video platform, now operating under a controversial ownership split, blamed last week's snowstorm for crippling an Oracle-operated data center that left 220 million American users struggling with broken features, failed uploads, and frozen view counts. The timing couldn't have been worse - coming just days after the finalized U.S. deal that handed control to domestic investors.
TikTok just climbed out of its worst technical crisis since the U.S. ownership drama began. The company announced Sunday it's fully restored service after a snowstorm-triggered outage that left its massive American user base in the dark for days.
The culprit? A winter storm that hammered a primary U.S. data center operated by Oracle, taking down tens of thousands of servers that power TikTok's American 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 company said in a post on X. The storm caused power failures that cascaded into network and storage problems across the infrastructure.
But the technical meltdown couldn't have hit at a worse moment. The outage coincided almost perfectly with TikTok's transition to new ownership - a deal finalized in January that saw U.S.-based investor consortium TikTok USDS take an 80% controlling stake, leaving ByteDance with just 20%. For a platform serving 220 million users trying to prove it can operate independently from Chinese ownership, the timing was catastrophic.
Users felt the pain across nearly every core feature. Content posting ground to a halt. In-app search returned errors. Load times stretched endlessly. Creators watched their freshly posted videos sit at zero views, the platform's real-time metrics completely frozen. TikTok acknowledged the severity, warning creators they might see no engagement metrics until engineers could dig the platform out of its technical hole.
