- TikTok took six days to fully restore services after an Oracle outage took parts of the app down
- Severe winter weather caused a power outage, and several knock-on effects
- This happened in the same month that TikTok's US ownership was complete
TikTok has confirmed its recent downtime was due to a power outage at one of its primary US data centers, operated by Oracle, which triggered knock-on effects for tens of thousands of servers.
The company outlined how a "major infrastructure issue" on January 26 caused "multiple bugs, slower load times, or timed-out requests," leading some creators' videos to show 0 views or likes.
Although the primary caused was identified and fixed pretty quickly, it took TikTok nearly a week to fully restore connections in some geographies.
TikTok outage caused by Oracle data center power issue
The company has since confirmed the power outage at Oracle's data center was caused by severe winter weather.
"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 US," it noted.
"Over the weekend, an Oracle data center experienced a temporary weather-related power outage which impacted TikTok," Oracle spokesperson Michael Egbert said separately by email (via Reuters).
It's unclear which Oracle data center was impacted.
While full restoration was complete by Sunday, February 1, "significant progress" had been made one day after the incident was identified.
"We've made significant progress in recovering our US infrastructure with our U.S. data center partner," TikTok said on January 27, promising to deliver ongoing updates. The next update came five days later upon full restoration, triggering questions over the company's transparency and commitment to keeping customers informed.
The timing is also interesting – the US takeover was also complete in January, largely driven by Oracle data centers. TikTok USDS, an American consortium, now owns 80% of the company within the United States. ByteDance, the original owner, now only has a 20% share.
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