We Now Know What Caused the TikTok Outage

TikTok released an official statement following the outage.

Key Takeaways

TikTok experienced an outage on Sunday.
The company released a statement on Monday, attributing the issue to a power outage at a U.S. data center.
The app just experienced a change in ownership as the Chinese-based Bytedance officially divested its majority stake to U.S. companies.

If you tried hopping on TikTok Sunday, you might have noticed something odd: the app wasn’t working. Outages happen, of course, as anyone who has Verizon can attest. But in the moment, theories were flying left and right. TikTok had just officially moved into U.S. control, leading some to speculate that the outage had something to do with this change in ownership. As one user put it, “TikTok being down days after the people they were forced to sell to take it over does not feel like a coincidence.”

As it happens, it does appear that the changing of the guard was responsible for the outage—just not in the way that some conspiracy theories might suggest. TikTok finally released a statement on X Monday morning, attributing the outage to issues at a U.S. data center. The statement is as follows: “Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate. We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”

The outage might not be the only thing different about TikTok

For its part, TikTok is very much operational at the moment. If the issue really was just isolated to a power outage at this data center, that data center appears to have patched things up. But that doesn’t mean the company’s reputation is patched up. Users are accusing the app’s new owners of changing the algorithm, complaining of reset For You Pages, irrelevant content in feeds, and AI-generated content. I’ve seen users accuse the app of blocking anti-Trump and anti-ICE content, while comedian Gianmarco Soresi says even some of his non-political TikToks have “zero views,” which he attributes to the ineffectiveness of the people running the app. (I’ve reached out to TikTok for comment on user reports of changes to the algorithm and will update if I hear back.)

We’ll need more time to know whether or not there were serious changes made to TikTok’s algorithm and user feeds in the wake of this sale. But the app is running—at least, for now.

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