TikTok US outage gone, platform fully restored

After it briefly went dark for thousands of users across the US, TikTok has been restored with services fully brought to normal.

Multiple TikTok outages last week adversely affected user experience, with the social platform having over 220 million users in the US.

TikTok attributed last week's disruptions to the fierce snowstorm that draped most of the US, which also caused an outage at an Oracle-operated data centre responsible for TikTok operations.

“We have successfully restored TikTok back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary U.S. data centre site operated by Oracle," the company said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

"The winter storm led to a power outage which caused network and storage issues at the site and impacted tens of thousands of servers that help keep TikTok running in the U.S. This affected many of TikTok’s core features—from content posting and discovery to the real-time display of video likes and view counts,” it added. 

Following its ownership transfer last month to a joint venture which is largely backed by US investors, TikTok was downloaded 41,000 times within days of the TikTok deal’s finalisation, noted analyst firm AppFigures.

The US-based investor consortium secured a controlling 80% stake in the company, while the remaining 20% ownership is held by ByteDance.

What's the problem with TikTok?

As the deal finalisation coincided with the snowstorm, users faced glitches in posting and searching within the app, besides slower load times.

At the time of the outage, TikTok stated that creators might see zero views on their posts until the problem is fully resolved.

The company also said at the time that it was working on redressal, but outages seemed intact as users continued to face problems with posting content.