TikTok, which is under new ownership in the US, said on Sunday it had restored the service after last week’s outages marred users’ experiences. The social network has over 220 million users in the US
The company blamed last week’s snowstorm, which caused an outage at an Oracle-operated data center responsible for TikTok’s operations.
“We’ve successfully returned TikTok to normal operation following a major outage caused by winter weather bringing down a major US data center site operated by Oracle. The winter storm led to a power outage that caused network and storage issues on the site and affected tens of thousands of servers that help keep TikTok running in the US. It counts,” the company said in a post on X.
In January, the US finalized the deal to create a separate entity for TikTok. A consortium of US-based investors called TikTok USDS took 80% of the shares it controls, with ByteDance holding the remaining 20%.
After the deal was finalized – which coincided with the blizzard – users experienced errors in features such as posting, in-app search, slower load times and lags. TikTok noted that creators may see zero views on their posts until the issue is resolved. The company later said it was working to fix the problem, but outages continued and users experienced problems posting content.
TikTok’s transition to a new ownership structure, coupled with app snafus and user experience issues, has been beneficial for some other social networks. Mark Cuban-backed short video app Skylight, which is based on the AT protocol, saw its user base jump to more than 380,000 users the week the deal closed. Upscrolled, a social network from Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, also climbed the App Store rankings to reach second place in the social media category in the US.
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