Updated: January 26, 2026, 1:01 PM EST TikTok has shared more details about the cause of the outage affecting US users over the past 24 hours.
TikTok has new American owners (finally), but the app had a rough opening weekend, with many American users unable to access the app, upload new videos, or refresh their feed. Now, TikTok has explained what went wrong.
According to TikTok, the reason for the downtime on the app was a power outage.
“We are working to restore our services following a power outage at a US data center yesterday, impacting TikTok and other apps we operate,” an official statement from TikTok posted on Twitter said.
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TikTok seems to be working normally at the moment.
Why is everyone on TikTok using punch cards to achieve their goals?
Over the weekend, the social media app was hit by thousands of user outage reports, with DownDetector showing a surge in the number of users reporting problems accessing the platform. (Disclosure: DownDetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of Mashable.)
Credit: Down Detector
However, it’s worth noting that TikTok has had a very busy week. On Thursday, the Chinese-owned platform announced it had reached a deal to continue operating in the US after years of pressure from politicians, creating the attractively named, majority US-owned TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Following the announcement, US users were greeted with a pop-up asking them to read and agree to the app’s new terms of service, causing confusion and concern among some users.
Is it possible that users faced problems on Sunday due to the transfer of ownership and whatever else is involved behind the scenes? It’s hard to say without any official statement from TikTok, but the timing certainly seems notable.
Matt Binder contributed additional reporting to this story.
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