TikTok Restores Full Service Following Major Oracle Data Center Outage

TikTok announced on Sunday that it has successfully restored full service following a significant infrastructure outage that disrupted user experience across its U.S. operations last week. The platform, which serves over 220 million users in the United States, experienced widespread service degradation affecting critical functionality.

According to the company's official statement, the outage was triggered by severe winter weather conditions that impacted an Oracle-operated data center serving as the primary infrastructure hub for TikTok's U.S. operations. The winter storm caused a power failure that cascaded into network and storage system failures across the facility.

"We have successfully restored TikTok back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary U.S. data center site operated by Oracle," the company stated. "The winter storm led to a power outage which caused network and storage issues at the site and impacted tens of thousands of servers that help keep TikTok running in the U.S."

The infrastructure failure affected multiple core platform features, including:

• Content posting and upload functionality
• Discovery and search capabilities within the application
• Real-time metrics display for video likes and view counts
• Overall application load times and responsiveness

The timing of the outage coincided with TikTok's recent ownership transition in the United States. In January, the platform finalized a restructuring deal that established a separate U.S. entity. Under this arrangement, a U.S.-based investor consortium called TikTok USDS acquired an 80% controlling stake, while ByteDance retained the remaining 20% ownership.

During the extended outage period, content creators reported zero view counts on newly posted content, and users experienced persistent issues with posting, searching, and general platform navigation. The company acknowledged these issues and maintained communication regarding restoration efforts throughout the incident.

The service disruption created opportunities for competing platforms. Skylight, a short-form video application backed by Mark Cuban and built on the AT Protocol, experienced significant growth, with its user base expanding to over 380,000 users during the week of the deal finalization. Similarly, Upscrolled, a social network developed by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, climbed to the second position in the U.S. App Store's social media category, recording approximately 41,000 downloads in the days following TikTok's infrastructure issues, according to analytics firm AppFigures.

The incident highlights the critical importance of infrastructure resilience and disaster recovery planning for large-scale social media platforms, particularly during periods of organizational transition.