U.S. TikTok creators might be experiencing disruptions in posting content for the second time in two months because of “an issue with Oracle data centers,” according to an X post by TikTok U.S.
Similar issues were seen in January. Users trying to post content critical of President Trump’s immigration crackdown speculated that the issue was an effort to censor non-conservative users, carried out by the new, Trump-affiliated owners of the US-based wing of TikTok. TikTok denied such censorship.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s System Status page says the company’s Ashburn, Virginia facility is experiencing a “Service Disruption” as of Tuesday night. “Oracle engineers have taken steps to improve the stability of the underlying services supporting the affected network infrastructure, and are now proceeding with further mitigation efforts,” the page says.
READ: TikTok completes transition to shopping-focused platform (
According to Downdetector, the reports of problems trickled in on Tuesday morning. It appeared to have peaked and then tapered off heading to Wednesday morning, as users in most of the U.S. would have gone to bed.
These outages have caused concern since moving to Oracle’s infrastructure was pitched as a solution to data sovereignty concerns when ByteDance agreed to divest U.S. operations. Oracle would host American user data on domestic servers, theoretically addressing national security worries that had threatened the app with an outright ban.
However, the transition exposed what some industry observers are calling enterprise reliability red flags, according to The Tech Buzz.
“Two outages in a matter of days isn’t just bad luck – it suggests fundamental capacity or configuration issues,” says Sarah Chen, a cloud infrastructure analyst at Gartner. “When you’re handling the kind of traffic TikTok generates, you need bulletproof redundancy and failover systems. Something’s not working as planned.”
READ: TikTok owner ByteDance takes on Alibaba by entering China’s AI cloud market (
The first outage occurred just 48 hours after the ownership transfer completed, affecting users for approximately three hours before service was restored. While this was blamed on “migration-related configuration adjustments,” or problems related to the transition. However the second outage suggests these issues go beyond problems related to setup.
TikTok is currently trying to rebuild trust under new ownership, and back-to-back outages tied to its own infrastructure partner aren’t a great look. Competitors like Meta and Snap are reportedly paying attention to this.
Industry sources suggest Oracle may need to significantly expand capacity or reconfigure its approach to handling TikTok’s traffic patterns, especially since Oracle’s traditional strength has been in enterprise database software, not consumer-facing applications with TikTok’s unique demands.