TikTok Service Disrupted by US Data Center Power Outage

TikTok Service Disrupted by US Data Center Power Outage

January 26, 2026

A significant power outage at a US data center has disrupted services for TikTok and its related applications, highlighting the critical infrastructure dependencies of major social media platforms. The incident underscores the operational risks faced by digital services that rely on complex, centralized data center facilities to serve their massive user bases.

The service disruption began in the early hours of Sunday, January 26, 2026, impacting users across the United States. TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, the entity formed to operate TikTok in the US, confirmed the outage was caused by a power failure at one of its domestic data centers. In a statement posted on the social media platform X, the company said, "Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a US data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate. We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon."

Users reported issues including difficulties logging into the app and delays in uploading videos. The timing of the outage is particularly notable, occurring just days after the formal finalization of the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, a deal that secured the platform's continued operations in the country. As part of this joint venture structure, Oracle holds a 15 percent ownership stake and has been a long-standing infrastructure partner for TikTok's US operations. While Oracle's public status page indicated all its systems were operational, the incident points to potential vulnerabilities within a specific facility or power chain.

For the data center industry, this event serves as a stark reminder of the mission-critical nature of power resilience. Even brief outages at facilities hosting hyperscale workloads can immediately affect millions of end-users and damage platform reliability reputations. It is likely to intensify scrutiny on redundancy measures, backup power systems, and disaster recovery protocols within colocation and cloud facilities that support essential public-facing digital services. The incident may accelerate investments in more distributed infrastructure architectures and on-site power generation solutions to mitigate similar risks in the future.

Source: datacenterdynamics