TikTok Issues Statement, Confirms Major Algorithm Problems After U.S. Sale

Over the weekend, TikTok users in the United States began to notice issues with their "For You" feeds, as well as the ingestion of new content into the app. This followed the long-awaited creation of a separate U.S. TikTok entity last week.

On Monday, the new joint U.S. entity confirmed that it was experiencing issues and provided some insight about why the problems were happening and how long they are expected to persist.

TikTok Users Notice Issues

Over the weekend, TikTok users began to notice that the popular video-based social media app was having issues.

Users noticed that their "for you" pages were showing old or irrelevant content, comments were not loading correctly, and new videos were not being shown to wide audiences, sometimes getting just a handful of views for accounts that had thousands of followers.

This came just a few days after the creation of a separate U.S. TikTok entity last week, which was mandated by the U.S. government due to concerns about the Chinese government potentially accessing user data via the app’s former parent company, ByteDance.

The timing led many to think that the new ownership and the outages were somehow related.

TikTok Issues a Statement

In a statement on Monday, TikTok's new U.S. join venture confirmed that it was experiencing some issues as a result of a "power outage" at a U.S. data center and that it hoped the issue would be resolved "soon."

"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 company wrote in a statement on Monday via 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."

A TikTok spokesperson said that any algorithm issues that users may have noticed over the weekend were likely due to the outage. The company told Business Insider that it informed employees of the outage on Sunday and has been working to fix the issue since then.