The Digester
Week 5, Wednesday

TikTok outage in US fuels trust crisis for its new American owners

A US data center power outage disrupted TikTok across the country days after the app transferred control to a majority US investor group, sparking user claims of political censorship that the company denies.

  • Downdetector logged a surge of US outage reports starting Sunday with service not fully restored for all users.
  • TikTok says a power outage at a US data center caused the disruption and denies intentional content suppression.
  • Users reported failing uploads, sharply lower views, and videos stuck under review, including posts about recent immigration enforcement actions.
  • The outage comes days after TikTok formed TikTok USDS Joint Venture to comply with a 2024 divestment law and retrain recommendation systems on US data.
  • Oracle, which hosts US user data since 2022 and owns 15 percent of the new US entity, declined to comment on the outage.
  • Concerns about algorithm changes, overlapping job listings, and expanded data collection under the new entity have amplified user distrust and calls to delete the app

Sources

wired.com