The American arm of the social media biz says it running normally following a significant outage caused by Winter Storm Fern. In an update on X, TikTok's US owners said the bad weather led to a power outage that caused network and storage issues at an Oracle datacenter site, which affected "tens of thousands of servers" that keep TikTok running in the US. While the storm was described as unusually large and severe, we note that Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison previously boasted to analysts in 2022 that "our cloud is very secure and extremely reliable,"
Anyone wanting to get their TikTok fix in the United States recently had a rough time. The app went haywire, kicking off early on the morning of January 25, due to a power outage at a key data center that knocked out services nationwide. Users reported the app crashing, with videos getting stuck and refusing to play, upload, or even hit a single view.
Over the past several days, TikTok users have found themselves at a loss. Literally, I mean: They lost their audiences, and their view counts showed "0." Some people who attempted to upload content about anti-ICE protests or the killing of Alex Pretti alleged that the platform was intentionally blocking them from doing so. Others were able to get their videos uploaded, but alleged that TikTok was not distributing them.
We've made significant progress in recovering our U.S. infrastructure with our U.S. data center partner. However, the U.S. user experience may still have some technical issues, including when posting new content. We're committed to bringing TikTok back to its full capacity as soon as possible. We'll continue to provide updates. Thanks for your patience.
As we moved into the third day of the TikTokalypse, the app appears to have finally stabilized in the US, as we verified that it's possible to consistently publish new videos and even have other people watch them. That hasn't been a simple task since the service started having problems early Sunday morning, but on Tuesday morning, I was able to post a new short video and watch one published by my colleague in the UK.
Between the new Macs, iPhones and rumored AI gadgets, Apple surprised us with an upgraded, second-generation AirTag. It has Apple's latest Ultra Wideband chip - the same one used in the iPhone 17 lineup and the Apple Watch Ultra 3. It also uses Precision Finding to reach items up to 50 percent further away than the previous AirTag model. This feature will now work with any Apple Watch Series 9, Ultra 2 or newer.
