TikTok was hit with outage issues in the U.S. just days after a major ownership shakeup, and users are nervous about what it means for the future of the short-form video platform.
Across the U.S., users took to social media over the weekend to report several issues with the app. Downdetector reported receiving more than 500,000 user reports over the past 24 hours, citing problems with TikTok’s functionality, specifically the For You page not refreshing, with reports peaking on Sunday morning.
A spokesperson for the new joint venture that operates TikTok’s U.S. business emailed Gizmodo a post on X that blamed the issues on a power outage at a U.S. data center.
“We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon,” the post reads.
The outage comes just days after TikTok announced a new joint venture that now oversees its U.S. business, led by three managing investors that each hold a 15% stake. The managing investors include Oracle, the tech giant founded by Larry Ellison, as well as Silver Lake, Abu Dhabi–based MGX.
The announcement, made on Thursday, said the joint venture was created to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order issued in September, which allows TikTok to continue operating in the U.S. under new leadership.
“The majority American owned Joint Venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users,” said the press release announcing the new entitiy.
It didn’t take long for users to say things felt different.
Some users reported having trouble uploading videos related to ICE protests, while others said they noticed a sudden lack of political content on the app.
“The new TikTok algorithm has ZERO, and I mean absolutely ZERO news or politics content, not one word about anything going on at all, not even the weather,” wrote one user on X.
In its announcement, the joint venture said its mandate was to “secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm through comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity measures,” adding that the algorithm would be retrained on U.S. user data and be secured on Oracle servers.
It’s also worth noting that Ellison is an ally of President Trump and the sixth-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $231 billion, according to Bloomberg. His son, David Ellison, recently took over Paramount and is looking to pick up Warner Bros. Discovery next.
U.S. politicians have spent years trying to force ByteDance, the app’s Chinese founder, to give up control of TikTok. Trump first signed an executive order in 2020 demanding that ByteDance sell the app’s U.S. operations.
President Joe Biden eventually signed a bill in 2024 that would effectively ban TikTok in the U.S. if ByteDance failed to divest. The Supreme Court upheld the law last January, ruling that forcing a sale was justified by national security concerns tied to TikTok’s links to China.
Still, some lawmakers have suggested the push to ban TikTok had less to do with national security and more to do with the kind of political content circulating on the platform.
Then-Sen. Mitt Romney linked the broad bipartisan support for the ban to concerns among lawmakers about pro-Palestinian content on the app during a forum in May 2024.
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