TikTok’s first weekend under its new American ownership has been an absolute disaster. Users across the platform have been experiencing everything from login issues to videos stuck in review purgatory, and the company has been radio silent about what’s actually going on.
The problems started spiking early Sunday morning according to DownDetector, and here’s the thing: people aren’t just annoyed about technical glitches. The timing couldn’t be worse, or more suspicious depending on who you ask.
When Technical Problems Meet Political Protests
Larry Ellison’s Oracle-led consortium just took over TikTok’s US operations last week, and suddenly the app is falling apart. Videos won’t upload. The For You Page algorithm seems to have completely reset itself. Comments won’t load. One Verge writer had a video sitting “under review” for over six hours, which is basically an eternity in Technology time.
But here’s where it gets interesting. This all happened during major anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis following the death of Alex Pretti, a second local resident killed by federal agents. Politically active accounts started freaking out when their videos wouldn’t publish, especially since their previously political For You Pages suddenly looked like they’d been replaced with generic dancing videos and recipe content.
The error messages didn’t help calm anyone’s nerves either. When you’ve got Trump-friendly owners taking control of content moderation and your protest video won’t go live, you’re going to assume the worst.
Not Just an American Problem
Some Redditors outside the US reported similar issues, which throws a wrench into the censorship theory. Two British writers at The Verge said their TikTok worked fine, so the geographic spread of these problems is genuinely confusing.
This could actually support a different theory though. Backend changes during the ownership migration could have caused ripple effects that hit different regions randomly. The new owners have to retrain the entire algorithm using only US data, which is a massive undertaking that could definitely break things in unexpected ways.
The new business arrangement also comes with updated terms of service that collect more precise location data and details about users’ AI interactions. Moving all that infrastructure around while keeping a billion-user platform running smoothly? Good luck with that.
The Silence Says Everything
TikTok hasn’t confirmed anything. Not a tweet, not a statement, not even one of those vague “we’re looking into it” messages that companies love to throw out. A full day after the problems started, the official silence is deafening.
Maybe they’re scrambling to fix technical issues and don’t want to promise timelines they can’t meet. Maybe they’re dealing with something more complicated that involves the ownership transition. Or maybe they just don’t have a good answer yet and are hoping it all blows over.
The problem is that silence breeds speculation, and speculation in this political climate breeds conspiracy theories. Whether these are legitimate technical growing pains from a massive corporate transition or something more deliberate, TikTok needed to get ahead of this story yesterday.
Users are stuck in limbo, not knowing if their content is being censored or if they’re just caught in the crossfire of a botched tech migration. And the longer TikTok stays quiet, the more people are going to assume the worst about what their new American owners are actually doing with the platform.
