Some TikTok users in the United States were unable to post or watch videos on Tuesday morning after a new outage linked to an Oracle data centre.
TikTok said the disruption affected parts of its US service and blamed the problem on an issue at an Oracle facility. The company acknowledged that creators might find it difficult to upload content while engineers worked on a fix.
“Creators may temporarily experience lags in posting content while Oracle works to resolve the issue,” TikTok said on X.
Reports of frozen videos, failed uploads and slow loading times began before 9 a.m. Eastern Time (3 p.m. WAT, according to users who flagged the problem on Downdetector.
Around the same time, Oracle posted an update on X confirming that some of its cloud customers were facing service issues in Ashburn, Virginia.
“In the past 4 hours, some Oracle Cloud customers have been intermittently experiencing connection timeouts, errors, and increased latency in Ashburn. We are working quickly to restore normal service operations,” the company said.
The latest disruption is the second major outage for TikTok’s US service in just over a month.
In January, TikTok’s American operations were placed under a new structure known as the TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. The arrangement followed a US national security law that required ByteDance to divest its American TikTok business or face a ban.
Oracle forms part of the investor group that owns 80% of the joint venture. It also provides the cloud hosting and manages user data for US-based TikTok accounts. That means any technical fault on Oracle’s side has a direct effect on how the platform runs in the United States.
Just days after the sale was completed in January, TikTok suffered a similar outage. At the time, the company attributed the disruption to a winter storm that hit a major Oracle data centre.
Tuesday’s incident is likely to increase attention on the platform’s reliability. TikTok has more than 200 million users in the United States, many of whom rely on it daily for business, advertising and entertainment.
Oracle has not yet identified the specific cause of the latest outage.
