TikTok’s new American-led operation is facing its first major trust crisis after a sweeping outage scrambled feeds, tanked views and coincided with a wave of politically charged posts. The company insists the chaos was the result of data center failures, not deliberate suppression of sensitive topics, even as users and politicians accuse it of quietly burying content. At stake is whether the platform’s promised firewall between engineering glitches and political influence can hold under pressure.
As the U.S. arm of TikTok settles into majority American ownership, the outage has become an early test of its credibility on speech and transparency. The company is now trying to convince creators, regulators and a skeptical public that a “cascading systems failure” is a technical story, not a political one.
The outage that broke TikTok’s U.S. feed
According to the company, the disruption began with a power problem at a U.S. data center that underpins TikTok’s domestic infrastructure. Executives said the failure triggered a chain reaction that knocked key systems offline and left the U.S. app struggling to serve videos, a breakdown that outside reporting linked to a data center failure following storm-related power issues. Users across the United States reported frozen feeds, missing notifications and an inability to upload or edit clips as the problems stretched from Sunday into Monday.
Inside the company, engineers described what one internal statement called a “cascading systems failure” that rippled through the recommendation engine and content delivery network. TikTok later told creators that its platform had been disrupted as it dealt with a data center outage, and that it was working to bring the system “back to full capacity.” The company’s U.S. arm, now operating as TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC under majority American ownership, had already been under scrutiny, which made the timing of the technical collapse especially fraught for the new American venture.
How a power failure scrambled the algorithm
For users, the most visible symptom was not just downtime but a feed that suddenly felt alien. People who opened the app reported a flurry of old videos resurfacing on their For You pages, while new uploads appeared to stall at zero views, a pattern that TikTok later tied to the algorithm struggling to recover from the cascading failure. Instead of the hyper-personalized stream that normally defines the app, many saw generic or recycled clips that suggested key personalization systems were offline.
Company statements acknowledged that the outage had led to multiple bugs, including issues with notifications, search and the core recommendation engine. One update said that since the previous day, engineers had been working to restore services after a U.S. power outage caused a cascading systems failure that disrupted feeds which are typically hyper-personalized. The company later added that it had made significant progress in recovering its U.S. infrastructure with its domestic data center partner, while warning that the U.S. user experience was still not fully back to normal as it continued infrastructure recovery.
Creators see “zero views” and smell censorship
As the glitches spread, creators began to notice that new posts were not behaving like normal outages. Instead of failing to upload, videos appeared to publish but then stalled at “zero views,” even for accounts that typically draw large audiences. Thousands of users complained that their content was not being seen, a pattern that fueled speculation that the new U.S. operation was quietly throttling posts, despite TikTok’s insistence that the problems were tied to technical glitches rather than policy changes. The perception that the app was selectively muting voices hardened as screenshots of stalled view counters spread across rival platforms.
Some of the loudest complaints came from political creators who said their criticism of President Donald Trump or federal agencies had suddenly stopped reaching followers. Their claims landed in an environment already primed for suspicion, as the U.S. joint venture had been created to address fears that TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, could influence what Americans see. The new U.S. TikTok, officially the TikTok U.S. Data Security Joint Venture LLC, responded that the power outage had caused a range of bugs that affected views across the board, and that it was not suppressing content critical of Trump or any other political figure, a position it reiterated as it described how the outage caused a range.
ICE shootings, Epstein and a political firestorm
The outage might have been written off as a messy but ordinary technical failure if it had not collided with a series of highly charged news events. Around the same time, the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens during federal enforcement actions by ICE sparked outrage and political debate, and creators posting about the incidents said their videos were not getting traction. TikTok’s U.S. app, now under majority American ownership, denied that it was suppressing posts about ICE or the shootings, saying that any drop in views was tied to the same glitches affecting other. The company also pushed back on claims that it was blocking messages containing the name “Epstein” within direct messaging, a sensitive topic given the history of financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
California Governor Gavin Newsom seized on the complaints, ordering a state probe into whether the platform was suppressing anti-Trump content and other politically sensitive posts. His move added official weight to what had started as user anecdotes, and it came as civil liberties groups were already raising alarms about algorithmic opacity. Reporting on the broader controversy noted that the technical failure had coincided with TikTok’s ownership transition to the TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, a shift that some saw as a safeguard and others viewed as a new vector for domestic political pressure, deepening what one analysis described as a trust crisis for.
Inside the new American TikTok and its data center bet
The controversy is unfolding as TikTok’s U.S. business tries to prove that its new structure can keep American data and decisions onshore. The TikTok U.S. Data Security Joint Venture LLC, often shortened to TikTok USDS, was set up to house U.S. operations and is described as a majority American-owned joint venture that works with domestic partners to store and process data. Shortly after 10 a.m. ET on Jan. 26, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC said in a statement that it was dealing with a power outage at a U.S. facility and that it was working with its partners to restore service, a message that framed the disruption as an infrastructure problem for the American joint venture. The company has emphasized that this architecture is meant to keep U.S. user data on domestic servers and under American oversight.
That strategy depends heavily on outside cloud and data center providers, which is why the outage has drawn attention to TikTok’s infrastructure choices. Reporting has linked the disruption to an Oracle facility that hosts TikTok’s U.S. data, with one account describing how an Oracle data center outage in the U.S. affected access for American users on domestic servers, a failure that was detailed by the TOI Tech Desk at TIMESOFINDIA.COM and noted at 09:36 IST. TikTok has said that it has made significant progress in recovering its U.S. infrastructure with its U.S. data center partner, but it has also acknowledged that the U.S. user experience may remain degraded while it continues to work with that partner on full recovery.
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