- It took six days for TikTok to fully restore services after an Oracle outage knocked parts of the app out of commission.
- The severe winter weather caused a power outage and several side effects.
- This happened the same month that TikTok’s US ownership was completed.
TikTok has confirmed that its recent downtime was due to a power outage at one of its major US data centers, operated by Oracle, which caused knock-on effects across tens of thousands of servers.
The company described how a “major infrastructure issue” on January 26 caused “multiple errors, slower loading times, or timed out requests,” leading to some creators’ videos showing 0 views or likes.
Although the root cause was identified and fixed fairly quickly, it took almost a week for TikTok to fully restore connections in some geographies.
TikTok outage caused by power issue at Oracle data center
The company has since confirmed that the power outage at the Oracle data center was caused by the severe winter weather.
“The winter storm caused a power outage that caused network and storage issues at the site and affected tens of thousands of servers that help keep TikTok running in the US,” it said.
“Over the weekend, an Oracle data center experienced a temporary weather-related power outage that impacted TikTok,” Oracle spokesperson Michael Egbert said separately via email (via PakGazette).
It is unclear which Oracle data center was affected.
While the full restoration was completed on Sunday, February 1, “significant progress” was made a day after the incident was identified.
“We have made significant progress in recovering our US infrastructure with our US data center partner,” TikTok said on January 27, promising to provide continued updates. The next update came five days after the full restoration, raising 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, largely 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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