The TikTok outage cause revealed

UPDATED: January 26, 2026, 1:01 p.m. EST TikTok has shared more details about the cause of the outage that affected US users over the past 24 hours.

TikTok (finally) has new US owners, but the app had a rough opening weekend, with many US users unable to access the app, upload new videos, or refresh their feed. Now TikTok has explained what went wrong.

According to TikTok, a power outage was the cause of downtime on the application.

“Since yesterday, we have been working to restore our services following a power outage at a US data center affecting TikTok and other applications we operate,” read an official statement from TikTok published on X. “We are working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We are sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”

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TikTok appears to be functioning normally at the moment.

Over the weekend, the social media app received thousands of user outage reports, with Downdetector showing spikes in users reporting issues accessing the platform. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)

Credit: Down Detector

It’s worth noting, however, that TikTok had a very busy week. On Thursday, the Chinese platform announced that it had reached an agreement to continue operating in the United States after years of pressure from politicians, creating the catchy-named and majority-owned TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Following the announcement, US users were greeted with a pop-up asking them to read and agree to the app’s new terms of service, causing confusion and concern among some users.

Is it possible that the transfer of ownership, and all that goes into it behind the scenes, led to the problems users experienced on Sunday? It’s hard to say without any official word from TikTok, but the timing certainly seems remarkable.

Matt Binder contributed additional reporting to this story.