For the second time this year, U.S. TikTok creators, “may temporarily experience lags in posting content,” TikTok U.S. said Tuesday on X. The problem is, according to that post, “An issue with an Oracle data center.” Again.
In January, amid similar hiccups with TikTok’s service, users trying to post content critical of President Trump’s immigration crackdown speculated that the issue was an effort to censor non-conservative users, carried out by the new, Trump-affiliated owners of the US-based wing of TikTok. TikTok U.S. denied censoring users in this way.
By all accounts, that denial of censorship seems to have been genuine. (I don’t know about you, but there’s been plenty of anti-ICE content in my TikTok feed since that outage) So the culprit apparently was, and is once again, server issues tied to Oracle—one of the stakeholders in the entity that now owns TikTok U.S.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s System Status page says the company’s Ashburn, Virginia facility is experiencing a “Service Disruption” as of Tuesday night. “Oracle engineers have taken steps to improve the stability of the underlying services supporting the affected network infrastructure, and are now proceeding with further mitigation efforts,” the page says.
According to Downdetector, the reports of problems trickled in on Tuesday morning, and appear to have peaked and started tapering off heading into Wednesday morning as users in most of the U.S. have gone to bed.
TikTok data for U.S. users began to be housed in the U.S. well before the transfer of operations from the China-based business entity to the U.S. one, so data migration from servers in Singapore may have nothing to do with these issues.
The physical trigger for the previous server problem, according to a February 1 statement from TikTok U.S. was “a significant outage caused by winter weather.”
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