TikTok says it’s back to normal in the United States after a wave of outages and glitches last week that disrupted the experience for millions. The platform, which now counts more than 220 million U.S. users, confirmed on Sunday that service has been restored following issues that affected key parts of the app.
According to TikTok, the problems were triggered by severe winter weather. A snowstorm led to a power outage at a primary U.S. data center operated by Oracle, which supports TikTok’s operations in the country. The loss of power reportedly caused network and storage failures that rippled across tens of thousands of servers—creating widespread instability for users.
The disruption wasn’t minor. TikTok said the outage interfered with many of its core features, including posting videos, discovering content, and the real-time updating of likes and view counts. For creators, that meant confusing performance data, with some users even seeing posts register as having zero views until systems stabilized. Others ran into slow load times, timeouts, and search issues inside the app. While TikTok said it was working to address the situation as complaints grew, outages and posting problems continued for a period before the company ultimately confirmed full recovery.
The timing of the incident also drew attention because it happened alongside a major shift in TikTok’s U.S. business structure. In January, the United States finalized an agreement that created a separate TikTok entity. Under the new setup, a U.S.-based investor consortium called TikTok USDS took an 80% controlling stake, while ByteDance retained the remaining 20%.
Even though TikTok attributed the service interruption to weather and data center failures—not ownership changes—the back-to-back combination of corporate transition and app instability created an opening for competitors. During the same week the deal was finalized, some alternative social platforms saw a noticeable surge in interest.
One example was Skylight, a Mark Cuban-backed short-video app built on the AT protocol, which said its user base jumped to more than 380,000 users during that period. Another was Upscrolled, a social network created by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, which climbed to the No. 2 spot in the U.S. App Store rankings for social media. The app reportedly saw 41,000 downloads within just a few days of the TikTok deal being finalized, based on figures cited from app analytics tracking.
For TikTok users, the takeaway is simple: the app is operating normally again, and the company says the outage has been resolved. But the episode underscores how quickly service disruptions—especially on a platform of TikTok’s scale—can frustrate creators, interrupt engagement, and push curious users to test out rival networks.
