TikTok faced significant issues over its first weekend after completing the sale of its U.S. operations, with some problems seemingly affecting users worldwide. As of a day after the troubles erupted, TikTok hasn’t confirmed any specifics, making it hard to gauge how widespread the issues are.
Many TikTok users, including some from The Verge, reported problems like trouble logging in, an inability to upload videos, a For You Page algorithm that seemed to reset, and difficulties loading comments and other site functions. According to DownDetector, reports of these issues surged in the early hours of Sunday morning, and some users are still experiencing errors. Numerous individuals have been unable to upload videos, which get stuck “under review” indefinitely. One Verge writer noted that a video uploaded six hours earlier still hasn’t gone live.
As of last week, TikTok’s U.S. operations are now owned by a consortium led by Oracle, the cloud computing giant founded by Larry Ellison, which was part of a solution to avoid a long-anticipated U.S. ban. This change has already resulted in new terms of service for U.S. users, requiring the collection of more detailed location data and information about user interactions with AI. The new owners also oversee U.S. content moderation, raising concerns about potential censorship, even before the recent issues surfaced. Additionally, they need to retrain the app’s algorithm to align with U.S. data.
The timing of these problems coincided with recent anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, heightened by the death of local resident Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents. This led many to speculate about a connection between TikTok’s technical difficulties and the political climate, especially when some users saw error messages and noted a shift in their For You Pages from political content to more generic posts.
However, there’s currently no evidence directly linking the outage to the weekend’s protests. Issues have also been reported by Reddit users outside the U.S., although two British writers for The Verge have not experienced any problems. While this doesn’t rule out the possibility that the new ownership could be contributing to the issues, it’s plausible that technical glitches from the backend changes during the migration could impact TikTok’s global user base.
We reached out to TikTok for a comment regarding the outage but had not received a response by the time this article was published.
