We Now Know What Caused the TikTok Outage
If you tried to hop on TikTok on Sunday, you may have noticed something strange: the app wasn’t working. Outages happen, of course, as anyone with Verizon can attest. But at the time, theories were flying left and right. TikTok had just officially come under US control, leading some to speculate that the outage had something to do with this change in ownership. As one user put it, “TikTok being down days after the people they were forced to sell out to take it over doesn’t seem like a coincidence.”
It turns out that the changing of the guard appears to be responsible for the outage, but not in the way some conspiracy theories might suggest. TikTok finally released a statement Monday morning, attributing the outage to issues in a U.S. data center. The statement reads: “As of 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. We are working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We are sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”
The outage may not be the only thing different about TikTok
For its part, TikTok is very operational at the moment. If the problem was truly limited to a power outage at this data center, this data center appears to have fixed things. But that doesn’t mean the company’s reputation is patched up. Users are accusing the app’s new owners of changing the algorithm, complaining about reset For You pages, irrelevant content in feeds, and AI-generated content. I’ve seen users accuse the app of blocking anti-Trump and anti-ICE content, while comedian Gianmarco Soresi claims that even some of his apolitical TikToks have “no views,” which he attributes to the inefficiency of the people running the app. (I reached out to TikTok for comment on user reports of the algorithm changes and will update if I hear back.)
What do you think of it so far?
It will take more time to know if any serious changes have been made to TikTok’s algorithm and user feeds as a result of this sale. But the application East running – at least, for now.
