TikTok's first weekend under new American ownership turned into a technical nightmare as users across the globe reported widespread platform failures. The issues - ranging from login troubles to broken video uploads and algorithmic resets - began spiking early Sunday morning and persisted for hours, raising questions about whether the problems stem from backend migration issues tied to the recent ownership change. While the company hasn't confirmed any outage, users and even some Verge staffers documented the chaos unfolding in real time.
TikTok just had the kind of weekend every tech company dreads - a massive platform failure right as the world watches its historic ownership transition play out.
The issues started creeping in early Sunday morning, catching users off guard with a cascade of broken features. Videos wouldn't upload, sitting in an endless "under review" purgatory. Login screens froze. The For You Page algorithm appeared to have amnesia, suddenly serving up generic content to users who'd spent years training it on their preferences. Comments refused to load. For a platform built on real-time content creation and algorithmic precision, it was essentially a complete breakdown.
DownDetector registered the spike in reports during those early Sunday hours, and by midday, Reddit threads were filling with frustrated creators documenting their problems. One Verge writer uploaded a video late Saturday that still hadn't gone live six hours later - an eternity in TikTok time.
The timing couldn't be more suspicious. Just last week, TikTok's US operation officially transferred to a new ownership consortium led by Larry Ellison's Oracle, the solution brokered to avoid a total US ban. That deal came with immediate changes: new terms of service demanding more precise location data, details about AI interactions, and a complete handoff of US content moderation to the new owners. Most significantly, the algorithm itself needs retraining based exclusively on US user data.
