- TikTok took six days to fully restore services after an Oracle outage took down parts of the app.
- Severe winter conditions caused a power outage and several repercussions
- This happened the same month that US ownership of TikTok was finalized.
TikTok has confirmed that its recent downtime was due to a power outage at one of its main US data centers, operated by Oracle, which triggered impacts on tens of thousands of servers.
The company explained how a “major infrastructure issue” on January 26 caused “multiple bugs, slower loading times, or timed out requests,” which caused some creators’ videos to show 0 views or 0 likes.
Although the root cause was identified and corrected relatively quickly, it took TikTok almost a week to fully restore connections in some geographies.
TikTok outage caused by Oracle data center power issue
The company has since confirmed that the power outage at Oracle’s data center was caused by severe winter conditions.
“The winter storm resulted in a power outage that caused network and storage issues at the site and affected tens of thousands of servers that help run TikTok in the United States,” the statement noted.
“Over the weekend, an Oracle data center experienced a temporary weather-related power outage that affected TikTok,” Oracle spokesperson Michael Egbert said separately via email (via Reuters).
It is unclear which Oracle data center was affected.
Although the full restoration was completed by Sunday, February 1, “significant progress” was made a day after the incident was identified.
“We have made significant progress in recovering our US infrastructure with our US data center partner,” TikTok said on January 27, promising to provide continued updates. The next update came five days later, after a full rollback, prompting questions about transparency and the company’s commitment to keeping customers informed.
The timing is also interesting: the American takeover was also finalized in January, largely driven by Oracle data centers. TikTok USDS, an American consortium, now owns 80% of the company in the United States. ByteDance, the original owner, now only has a 20% share.
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