- It took six days for TikTok to fully restore services after an Oracle outage took parts of the app down
- Harsh winter weather caused power outages and numerous knock-on effects
- This happened in the same month that TikTok’s US ownership was complete
TikTok has confirmed that its recent downtime was due to a power outage in one of its primary US data centers, run 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 errors, slower load times or timeout requests”, leading to some creators’ videos showing 0 views or likes.
Although the root cause was identified and fixed fairly quickly, it took nearly a week for TikTok to restore connections in some geographies.
TikTok outage caused by power issue in Oracle data center
The company has since confirmed that 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 on site and affected 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 that impacted TikTok,” Oracle spokesman Michael Egbert said separately via email (via Pakinomist).
It is unclear which Oracle data center was affected.
While full restoration had been completed by Sunday 1 February, “significant progress” had been made a day after the incident was identified.
“We have made significant progress in restoring our US infrastructure with our US data center partner,” TikTok said on January 27, promising to provide ongoing updates. The next update came five days later after a full recovery, prompting questions about the company’s transparency and commitment to keeping customers informed.
The timing is also interesting – the US acquisition was also completed in January, mainly 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% stake.
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