TikTok broke in its first weekend with US ownership

TikTok has suffered from extensive problems on its first weekend after completing the sale of its US arm, though some issues appear to have spread globally. TikTok has yet to confirm any issues a day after troubles began, making it difficult to surmise the extent of the problems.

Nevertheless, Tiktokkers — including some Verge writers — have confirmed issues including difficulty logging in, an inability to upload videos, a For You Page algorithm that appeared to have reset itself, problems loading comments, and other site features.

According to DownDetector, the issues spiked in the early hours of Sunday morning, but some users are still reporting errors. Many have found it impossible to upload videos, which sat “under review” indefinitely, and for one Verge writer that’s still the case — a video uploaded last night has yet to go live on their page some six hours later.

As of last week, TikTok’s US operation is under the ownership of an investment consortium including Larry Ellison’s cloud giant Oracle, the solution to its long-threatened US ban. This has already led to the imposition of new terms of service on US users, which include collection of more precise location data and details of users’ AI interactions. The new owners also take control of US content moderation, which had sparked some to fear censorship even before this weekend’s issues, and must retrain the app’s algorithm based on US data.

Given the timing, many drew a link between TikTok’s issues, its US operation’s new Trump-friendly owners, and this weekend’s anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, exacerbated by the killing of a second local resident, Alex Pretti, by federal agents. The phrasing of the error message led several politically active accounts to assume the worst when their videos wouldn’t publish, as did the fact that previously political For You Pages were suddenly filled with generic content.

However, so far there’s no reason to believe that the outage was directly linked to this weekend’s ICE activity, especially since some Redditors from outside the US have reported issues with the app, too — though it’s been fine for two of The Verge’s British writers. That doesn’t guarantee the new ownership has nothing to do with it though, as technical problems caused by backend changes during the migration could easily have ripple effects across TikTok’s global userbase.

We reached out to TikTok for comment on the outage, but hadn’t heard back by the time of publication.