TikTok recovers after week-long outage tied to snowstorm

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TikTok has confirmed that its core services in the United States are now fully restored after a significant outage last week disrupted the social platform for millions of users. The company said the outage was caused by severe winter weather that knocked out power at a key U.S. data centre operated by Oracle, leading to widespread network and storage issues across tens of thousands of servers.

Users across the country reported problems including delayed post uploads, difficulty discovering content, slower load times, and inaccurate or missing engagement metrics such as view and like counts. In some cases, creators saw their videos register zero views until the technical issues were addressed.

In a post on X, TikTok acknowledged that the outage affected many of its core features, explaining that the winter storm’s power outage was responsible for the cascading system failures at the Oracle facility that supports its U.S. operations. Engineering teams worked with Oracle to restore normal service levels, and the company apologized for the disruption caused to its large U.S. user base.

The restoration comes during a period of transition for TikTok’s U.S. business, which recently shifted to a new ownership structure with a U.S.–based investor group after finalising a deal to create a separate entity for American operations. The outage coincided with this change, prompting user reports of glitches and service interruptions that persisted until the repair work was completed.

While TikTok says services are back to normal, the episode highlighted how vulnerable major online platforms can be to infrastructure failures triggered by extreme weather, especially when key data centre sites are affected.