Popular video sharing app TikTok is dealing with a number of glitches and bugs as the service moves forward with the separation of its U.S. business from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
On Tuesday, TikTok acknowledged a widespread power outage at one of its data centers was causing issues with the platform, where American users have expressed frustration over glitches and apparent censorship.
Since last weekend, users have reported missing video counts and problems engaging others on TikTok. Some also reported the platform appeared to be blocks and posts containing certain words, including “Epstein.”
Those complaints drew the attention of California Governor Gavin Newsom late Monday evening, who said the state will investigate claims of “suppressed content critical of President Trump.”
The Trump administration helped facilitate the sale of TikTok’s U.S. business and services to a consortium of investors, some of whom curried personal favor with Trump himself. ByteDance will retain a minority stake in the venture.
The spin-out was intended to satisfy a new law signed by President Joe Biden last year that required TikTok to divest its U.S. business under threat of a banishment from American app stores. The law — which Trump supported as a proposal during his first term in office — was meant to assuage concerns over improper data collecting and sharing practices by ByteDance, which faced unproven accusations of improper collusion with Chinese authorities.
The formation of the new U.S. business requires TikTok to move its technical infrastructure to servers and computers located in the country, so they can be subject to American regulations, including legal requirements concerning data collecting and sharing practices.
That move has apparently crippled some of TikTok’s core features, which the U.S.-based company acknowledged in updates.
“While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve with our data center partner,” a spokesperson for TikTok U.S. said in a statement.
TikTok U.S. did not provide a timeline on when the glitches will be fixed. It also did not say where its data centers are located; millions of residents and businesses are dealing with the aftermath of a severe winter storm that resulted in widespread power disruptions across much of the eastern U.S., some of which are still ongoing.
