TikTok’s odd behavior was caused by a tech issue—but users’ response indicates the app has a trust problem
Anyone wanting to get their TikTok fix in the United States recently had a rough time. The app went haywire, kicking off early on the morning of January 25, due to a power outage at a key data center that knocked out services nationwide. Users reported the app crashing, with videos getting stuck and refusing to play, upload, or even hit a single view.
The app’s vaunted For You page turned into a glitchy mess, looping stale old clips and throwing out thoroughly non-personalized recommendations, while some users struggled to log in or comment on and repost videos. People searching for the latest videos about ICE raids and murders in Minnesota were shown zero results. Ditto if they sought out information on Jeffrey Epstein through TikTok’s search bar. Something was up, users felt.
The reason behind the issues is prosaic: A power outage, likely caused by weather, knocked the app offline for a while. “With the horrible winter storm in the U.S. this weekend, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the cause of some of these data outages,” says Jessica Maddox, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Georgia.
TikTok clarified in a public statement that it faced outages. “Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate,” the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, which was established this month to oversee the U.S. arm of TikTok following the deal to onshore ownership of U.S. user data, posted on X. “We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”
The company declined to comment on the record about the issue. Fast Company understands the outage was at an Oracle data center—the company that now oversees the app’s data on U.S. users after the deal earlier this month to establish the joint venture. That joint venture, which has American firms owning around 45% of the newly formed company, was pushed through after political pressure from Donald Trump. Oracle declined to comment.
So far, so simple. And yet, when faced with a malfunctioning feed, users didn’t chalk it up to the snowstorm or inclement weather. They pinpointed the app’s recent divestment to a U.S.-centered coalition of investors—which has been seen as a way for Donald Trump to try and allow U.S. companies to muscle in on the first major social media success story outside the United States—as evidence that something more malign was going on.
“I knew they were gonna nuke tiktok but I didn’t think it would be this quick. jesus christ,” posted one user. Another said that the app’s inability to serve views to videos, including those criticizing ICE activity in Minnesota, was down to a tone shift brought about by new ownership rather than a run-of-the-mill outage issue.
“What was striking about this TikTok outage was that users didn’t experience it as a technical failure at all,” says Tom Divon, a digital culture researcher and TikTok expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Many were carrying the political event narrative around it.”
That fear isn’t entirely unfounded, reckon the experts. The U.S. president has previously said that he distrusts traditional media, and even set up his own platform, Truth Social, in response to issues that he perceived with existing social media. “I think the reason people are so upset and thinking this could be a large-scale suppression is because it’s not out of the realm of possibility,” UGA’s Maddox says. “We know for a fact that platforms do suppress certain topics from time to time.”
She points out that the political backdrop, coupled with the conspiratorial nature of trying to unpick the whims of social media algorithms, makes it easy to indulge in the idea that something more deliberate is going on with TikTok’s performance. “Social media activity is often thought of as conspiracy—thinking that blocking certain accounts changes your algorithm, or that there’s an invisible hand controlling what we do or do not see at any given time,” Maddox says.
“Because people don’t fully understand how social media works, there’s a turn toward conspiratorial thinking.” That conspiratorial thinking isn’t entirely unfounded, Divon says. “That reaction did not come out of nowhere. Because just months earlier, TikTok went dark for around 14 hours during the temporary ban scare—an episode that already taught users that access to the platform could be switched off by political decision,” he says.
There’s also a sense of inevitability, says Catalina Goanta, associate professor in private law and technology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “The U.S. takeover of TikTok has been received with a lot of pragmatism by many of its users, who had already collectively anticipated that algorithmic changes were to be expected.” Goanta believes that users expect meddling in the algorithm, so they see it even if it’s not actually happened—yet, or ever.
There’s another reason why people are worried: It could affect their livelihoods. Given the massive change in ownership of the platform in recent weeks, people are on edge about the impact it could have on them. TikTok’s own lobbying against its attempted ban by the Trump administration in recent years suggested that the app supports 4.7 million U.S. jobs and contributes $24 billion annually to the U.S. GDP.
The notion that might go away, or be materially changed under a new owner, makes people panic. “Trust has to be earned, not freely given,” Maddox says. “And the new TikTok joint venture has not yet given us a reason to trust them.”