TikTok’s First Weekend Under US Ownership Hit by Outages
▼ Summary
– TikTok experienced widespread technical issues, including login problems and a malfunctioning algorithm, following the sale of its US operations.
– The problems, which began spiking early Sunday, prevented users from uploading videos and caused features like comments to fail.
– TikTok’s US operations are now owned by a consortium including Oracle, leading to new terms of service and control over US content moderation.
– Some users speculated the outage was linked to new ownership and anti-ICE protests, but issues were also reported globally, suggesting technical causes.
– TikTok has not officially confirmed the extent or cause of the outage, and the company did not respond to requests for comment by the article’s publication.
The first weekend under TikTok’s new American ownership was marked by significant technical disruptions, affecting users both in the U.S. and in some international markets. The platform has not officially acknowledged the widespread problems, which began on Saturday and persisted into Sunday, leaving the full scope of the outage unclear. Reports from users and monitoring services like DownDetector indicate a major spike in errors during the early hours of Sunday morning.
TikTok users experienced a range of frustrating issues, including failed login attempts, an inability to upload videos, and a malfunctioning comment section. Perhaps most notably, many found their “For You” feed algorithm appeared to reset, flooding previously personalized pages with generic, non-political content. Videos that were uploaded often became stuck in a perpetual “under review” state, with some delays lasting over six hours. This timing is particularly sensitive, as it follows the completion of the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to a consortium that includes Oracle. This deal was structured to avert a potential U.S. ban and has already led to updated terms of service for American users, granting the new owners control over content moderation and mandating a retraining of the app’s algorithm using U.S. data.
The confluence of these ownership changes and the technical failures led many to speculate about a connection to current events. Over the same weekend, anti-ICE protests escalated in Minneapolis following another local resident’s death involving federal agents. The ambiguous error messages and the sudden depoliticization of some users’ feeds caused several politically active accounts to suspect intentional suppression. However, while the timing is suspicious, the problems do not appear to be isolated to the United States. Users from other countries have also reported similar glitches, suggesting a broader technical failure, though some regions, like the UK, were reportedly unaffected.
This points to the likely cause being backend migration issues as the new ownership assumes control, rather than targeted censorship. Major technical transitions often have unintended global ripple effects, even when changes are nominally confined to one region’s operations. While the new ownership’s influence on content policy remains a significant concern for many users, this weekend’s outages are more plausibly explained by the complex technical handover. TikTok has not provided a comment or explanation for the service disruptions at this time.
(Source: The Verge)
