Overview
- TikTok said service is back to normal after a multi-day U.S. outage and apologized, noting teams worked around the clock with Oracle to fully restore systems.
- The company reported a power loss caused network and storage failures that hit tens of thousands of servers, disrupting posting, discovery, and real-time likes and view counts for 220 million U.S. users.
- The incident followed the finalized transfer of TikTok’s U.S. business to a consortium holding about 80% (including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX), with ByteDance retaining roughly 20%, and Oracle providing core infrastructure.
- User complaints about suppressed posts and blocked terms such as “Epstein” prompted scrutiny, including a review announced by California Governor Gavin Newsom, while TikTok pointed to the data-center outage when asked about the claims.
- Competitors gained traction during the disruption, with Skylight surpassing 380,000 users and UpScrolled logging about 41,000 downloads, as U.S. uninstall rates for TikTok jumped 195% over recent norms, according to Sensor Tower.