TikTok says its services are restored after the outage

TikTok, which now operates under a new ownership structure in the U.S., said Sunday that it has fully restored service after last week's outages that disrupted the app for users. The social video platform has more than 220 million users in the United States.

The company stated that the disruption stemmed from last week's snowstorm, which triggered an outage at a data centre operated by Oracle that supports TikTok's U.S. operations.

"We have successfully restored TikTok 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. "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."

In January, the U.S. finalised a deal to establish TikTok as a separate entity in the U.S. A U.S.-based investor group known as TikTok USDS took an 80% controlling stake, while the remaining 20% ownership stayed with ByteDance, TikTok's parent company.

Following the deal's completion — which coincided with the winter storm — users began reporting widespread issues across the app. These included problems with video posting, in-app search malfunctions, slower load times, and frequent timeouts. TikTok also warned creators that their posts might temporarily show zero views until the issue was resolved. While the company later stated it was working to resolve the disruption, outages persisted, and users continued to report difficulty publishing content.

TikTok's transition to new ownership, combined with technical issues and a degraded user experience, created an opportunity for rival platforms. The Mark Cuban-backed short video app Skylight, built on the AT protocol, saw its user base surge to more than 380,000 users during the week the TikTok deal was finalised. Meanwhile, Upscrolled, a social network created by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, climbed the App Store rankings to reach No. 2 in the U.S. social media category. The app was downloaded 41,000 times within days of the deal's completion, according to AppFigures data.