The TikTok outage cause revealed

UPDATE: Jan. 26, 2026, 1:01 p.m. EST TikTok has shared more details about the cause of the outage that affected U.S. users over the past 24 hours.

TikTok has new U.S. owners (finally), but the app had a rough opening weekend, with many U.S. users unable to access the app, upload new videos, or refresh their feed. Now, TikTok has explained what went wrong.

According to TikTok, a power outage was the source of downtime on the app.

"Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate," said an official statement from TikTok posted on X. "We're working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We're sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon."

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TikTok appears to be working normally at the moment.

Over the weekend, the social media app was hit with thousands of user outage reports, with Downdetector showing spikes in users reporting problems in accessing the platform. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)

Credit: Down Detector

It's worth noting that TikTok has had a very busy week, however. On Thursday, the Chinese-owned platform announced that it had reached a deal to continue operating in the U.S. after years of pressure from politicians, creating the catchily named, majority U.S.-owned TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Following the announcement, U.S. users were greeted with a pop-up asking them to read and agree to the app's new Terms of Service, causing confusion and alarm among some users.

Is it possible that the transfer in ownership, and whatever that entails behind the scenes, led to the issues users experienced on Sunday? It's difficult to say without any official word from TikTok, but the timing certainly seems notable.

Matt Binder contributed additional reporting to this story.