TikTok says that it has completely resolved the technical issues and glitches that have been impacting the service over the past week, with the company citing the brutally cold weather in much of the United States as the culprit, taking down a data center operated by Oracle.
“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 said in a statement Sunday. “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. This affected many of TikTok’s core features — from content posting and discovery to the real-time display of video likes and view counts. Our teams worked around the clock with Oracle to ensure a safe and full restoration of systems.
“We’re sorry about the issues experienced by our U.S. community,” the statement continued. “We appreciate how much you count on TikTok to create, discover and connect with what matters to you. Thank you for your patience and understanding.”
The outage had been ongoing for days, with many creators having issues with posting videos, seeing view counts and searching for topics. The timing of the outage didn’t help, coming just days after the U.S. business of the social video platform was transferred to a new ownership group led by Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX. ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, will continue to own just shy of 20 percent of TikTok.
The timing led some users to speculate that changes to the algorithm or their view counts were connected to ideological or other preferences from the new ownership group, or the U.S. government, though the data center debacle appears to be the real source of problems.
The sale was connected to a law that required divestiture from Chinese ownership, with data security the main reason cited. In connection with the new ownership, Adam Presser, a TikTok veteran and former WarnerMedia executive, was named CEO, while Will Farrell, a veteran of TikTok and Booz Allen Hamilton, was named chief security officer, overseeing data privacy and security.
TikTok will now be fully oprational in time for Sunday’s Grammy Awards, as well as Super Bowl week.
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