TikTok users across the United States have spent the past several days wrestling with frozen feeds, missing videos, and broken notifications, and the company now says the root cause lies outside its own walls. Oracle has told partners that a power failure at one of its facilities disrupted the infrastructure that keeps TikTok’s U.S. app online, triggering a chain reaction inside the video platform’s systems. The outage has arrived at a politically sensitive moment, just as TikTok’s new American ownership structure is under intense scrutiny.
What began as scattered complaints about glitches has turned into a high profile test of whether TikTok’s new technical and governance setup can deliver on its promises of reliability and independence. The incident has exposed how tightly the app’s daily experience is tied to a single cloud provider, and how quickly technical trouble can feed into broader questions about censorship, national security, and the influence of President Donald Trump, who backed TikTok’s joint venture with Oracle.
What users saw when TikTok started to break
From a user’s perspective, the first sign of trouble was not a dramatic blackout but a subtle shift in how TikTok behaved. People reported that videos would not load, that uploads stalled at zero, and that notifications arrived late or not at all, even as the app itself opened normally. Some described their feeds as a ghost town, with familiar creators suddenly absent and new clips failing to appear, while others saw the same short set of videos looping over and over, a pattern that suggested deeper problems in the recommendation pipeline rather than a simple connectivity blip, according to early reports that framed the issue as TikTok being “down” or “not working” for large numbers of users in Jan, with the Company acknowledging the disruption in its TECH NEWS update for its app users and editors curated coverage of the NEWS in the United States through Jan.
As the problems deepened, the core experience that keeps people opening TikTok, Its For You page, became unreliable. Users said the algorithm that normally surfaces a personalized stream of clips struggled to refresh, with comments failing to load or loading so slowly that interacting with creators became nearly impossible for many people, and uploads timing out before they could be published, a pattern that matched detailed descriptions of how the algorithm and Its For You feed faltered in Its For You.
Oracle’s data center failure and the “cascading” breakdown
Behind the scenes, TikTok and its infrastructure partner were dealing with a far more traditional problem than rumors of hacking or political interference might suggest. Oracle has told stakeholders that an electrical issue at one of its U.S. facilities triggered an Oracle Data Center Power Outage Disrupts event that affected systems serving TikTok’s American users, a disruption that hit For Users In US Days After App completed a High, Stakes Joint Venture Deal that put Oracle at the center of TikTok’s domestic operations, according to financial and technology reports that tied the app’s sudden instability directly to the power failure at the Oracle Data Center Power Outage Disrupts facility and the For Users In US Days After App restructuring that followed the High, Stakes Joint Venture Deal in Oracle Data Center.
TikTok has described what followed not as a single outage but as a “cascading systems failure” that rippled through multiple layers of its stack. Engineers said that a TikTok US power outage caused a cascading systems failure leading to multiple bugs, and that Since the first signs of trouble they have been working to restore services in coordination with their U.S. data center partner, a phrase that pointed directly to Oracle’s role in hosting the app’s American infrastructure and highlighted how a localized power problem could knock out recommendation services, notifications, and publishing tools across the country, according to a detailed technical explanation of how the cascading systems failure unfolded Since the initial disruption in Since.
A trust crisis for TikTok’s new U.S. owners
The timing of the outage has amplified its impact far beyond the usual frustration that comes with a popular app going offline. TikTok’s U.S. business has just been spun off into a new structure, and the Data Center Outage Triggers Trust Crisis for New US Owners because the technical failure coincided with the ownership transition that was supposed to reassure regulators and users that the platform’s American operations were stable, independent, and insulated from both foreign influence and domestic political pressure, according to detailed accounts of how the Data Center Outage Triggers Trust Crisis for New US Owners at the very moment the new entity was trying to prove its reliability to lawmakers and the public in Data Center Outage.
That trust gap is especially sensitive because TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, has been under sustained scrutiny in Washington, and the joint venture with Oracle was pitched as a way to keep U.S. user data and decision making on American soil. The deal was praised by Trump, who has argued that the arrangement would both protect national security and preserve a platform he credits with helping him win the 2024 election, while the joint venture has denied censorship and said it would be inaccurate to report that this outage or any related issues were used to suppress political content, a stance that underscores how the technical explanation from Oracle intersects with broader debates over ByteDance, Trump, and the new governance model, according to detailed political and corporate accounts that link Trump’s support and ByteDance’s role to the joint venture’s public messaging in Trump.
Inside the broken feed: algorithms, missing videos, and user anger
From the outside, it is easy to treat a power outage as a binary event, with the lights either on or off, but TikTok’s problems have shown how fragile a complex recommendation engine can be when its inputs are disrupted. The company has acknowledged that a cascading systems failure messed up feeds, with users reporting that their For You Page, or FYP, showed stale or irrelevant clips, that videos from favorite creators were missing, and that some posts appeared without captions or engagement metrics, a pattern that TikTok linked directly to the data center outage when it told users that parts of their feeds might look “incomplete” or “missing,” according to a detailed breakdown of how the FYP and related systems were affected in Follow Dan Whateley.
Those glitches translated into real frustration for creators and viewers who rely on TikTok for income, activism, or simple entertainment. Thousands of TikTok users across the United Sta reported major glitches, with some videos refusing to upload at all and others vanishing from public feeds after appearing to post successfully, while Down reports tracked Hundreds of Users Report Major Glitches Today as people flooded social platforms with complaints and screenshots of broken timelines, according to social media monitoring that captured how Thousands of users in the United Sta experienced the Down event and how Hundreds of Users Report Major Glitches Today in a viral clip that summarized the chaos in Thousands of.
Recovery efforts and what comes next for TikTok and Oracle
As engineers worked to stabilize the platform, TikTok told users it was still working to recover its U.S. infrastructure and that progress was ongoing rather than instantaneous. Company representatives said they were making progress on restoring services and that some features were returning in stages, while acknowledging that the U.S. experience remained degraded for certain users, a message that arrived alongside a note of thanks for people’s patience and credited internal teams and partners with pushing toward full recovery, according to a detailed account of how TikTok framed its recovery efforts and how Sarah Perez reported that the company was still working to restore systems on Pacific time, with Image Credits pointing to Jaap Arriens and Getty Images for visual documentation of the disruption in Sarah Perez.
