If you opened TikTok on Sunday expecting your usual dopamine hit of dance videos and niche microtrends, you probably got a rude awakening instead. The app just stopped working. No videos, no scrolling, nothing. And naturally, the internet did what it does best: freaked out and started cooking up theories.
The timing couldn’t have been more suspicious. TikTok had just completed its transition into U.S. control, and suddenly the whole thing goes dark? Users weren’t having it. “TikTok being down days after the people they were forced to sell to take it over does not feel like a coincidence,” one person posted, echoing what thousands were thinking.
The Official Story Sounds Almost Boring
TikTok finally addressed the elephant in the room Monday morning with a statement on X. Turns out it was just a power outage at a U.S. data center. Their exact words: “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.”
Pretty anticlimactic, right? No grand conspiracy, no deliberate shutdown, just good old-fashioned Technology infrastructure problems. The kind of thing that happens when you rely on massive server farms to keep billions of videos flowing to millions of phones every second.
The app’s back up and running now, so if the power outage story holds water, their data center partner apparently got things sorted out. But here’s where it gets interesting.
Users Are Convinced Something Changed
The technical issues might be fixed, but TikTok’s new reputation problem is just getting started. People are absolutely convinced that the algorithm got switched up. We’re talking reset For You Pages, feeds full of content that has nothing to do with what they normally watch, and a suspicious uptick in AI-generated garbage.
Some users claim they’re seeing censorship of anti-Trump and anti-ICE content. Comedian Gianmarco Soresi jumped into the fray saying even his non-political videos are sitting at “zero views,” which he’s blaming on whoever’s running the show now. That’s a pretty dramatic drop for someone with an established following.
I reached out to TikTok for comment on whether they actually changed anything with the algorithm, but haven’t heard back yet. Not exactly surprising given everything they’re dealing with right now.
The Trust Is Already Gone
Here’s the thing about social media platforms: once users smell something fishy, good luck convincing them otherwise. It doesn’t matter if TikTok releases a hundred statements saying nothing changed. People are going to believe what they’re seeing on their screens.
And honestly? Can you blame them? A forced sale to new owners, an immediate outage, and suddenly everyone’s feed looks different. That’s not exactly a great look for maintaining user confidence in your platform’s integrity.
The real test will come over the next few weeks. If these complaints keep piling up and patterns emerge that can’t be explained away by coincidence or confirmation bias, TikTok’s new Business leadership is going to have a serious mess on their hands. Because at the end of the day, an app is only as good as users think it is, and right now the vibes are decidedly off.
