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TikTok ban: all the news on the app’s shutdown and return in the US
TikTok has suffered from extensive problems on its first weekend after completing the sale of its US arm. According to DownDetector, the issues spiked in the early hours of Sunday morning, but some users are still reporting errors.
TikTok has yet to confirm or comment on any issues more than a day after the troubles began, making it difficult to pin down the extent of the problems.
Many in the US have found it impossible to upload videos over the last day or so, which are sitting “under review” indefinitely. One video we uploaded from a US account last night has yet to go live, nearly 12 hours later, while a video uploaded from the UK is published — but it’s only visible to our editors who aren’t in the US. Similarly, accounts for pages like the BBC and The Guardian only show new uploads for those of us who live outside the US, while viewing the same account from the US shows only videos uploaded before Sunday morning.
Issues that thousands of people have reported and we’ve been able to confirm include difficulty logging in, the inability to upload or publish videos, a For You Page algorithm that isn’t personalized, problems loading comments, as well as errors flashing for other features, and problems with the CapCut video editor.
Given the timing, many drew a link between TikTok’s issues, its US operation’s new Trump-friendly owners, and this weekend’s anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, exacerbated by the killing of a second local resident, Alex Pretti, by federal agents. The combination of publishing errors and previously political For You Pages that are suddenly filled with generic content has led many to assume the worst when their videos about ICE wouldn’t publish, but at the moment, the problems appear to be much more extensive.
As of last week, TikTok’s US operation is under the ownership of an investment consortium including Larry Ellison’s cloud giant Oracle, the solution to its long-threatened US ban. This has already led to the rollout of new terms of service for US users, which include noting the collection of precise location data and details of users’ AI interactions. The new owners also take control of US content moderation, which had sparked some to fear censorship even before this weekend’s issues, and say they will retrain the app’s algorithm based on US data.
We reached out to TikTok for comment on the outage, but hadn’t heard back by the time of publication.
Update, January 26th: Added more details on the ongoing issues with TikTok.