TikTok Down: Mass Outage Hits US Users, Oracle in the Spotlight?

Liputan6.com, Jakarta - Users of the popular short-form video app TikTok in the United States experienced another significant service disruption, known as a TikTok outage, for two consecutive days on March 3 and 4, 2026.

This mass outage began on Tuesday, March 3, 2026, with a surge in problem reports peaking in the afternoon and continuing into the following day.

The impact was felt widely in major cities such as New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, disrupting both content creators' activities and the overall user experience.

TikTok USDS Joint Venture officially confirmed that the root cause of the issue stemmed from an outage at an Oracle data center, a key partner in their cloud infrastructure.

This marks the second incident related to Oracle in the past two months.

An issue with an Oracle data center is impacting some parts of the TikTok U.S. user experience. Creators may temporarily experience lags in posting content while Oracle works to resolve the issue. We appreciate your patience and understanding and will keep you updated. https://t.co/ex7S4vM9yU

— TikTok USDS Joint Venture (@tiktokusdsjv) March 3, 2026

TikTok USDS Joint Venture, via its official account on the X platform, explained that "an issue with Oracle's data center impacted some parts of the TikTok U.S. user experience."

It focused attention on Oracle, which is part of the investor group that owns 80% of the TikTok USDS Joint Venture.

Oracle itself acknowledged issues with some of its cloud customers at its Ashburn facility, experiencing connection timeouts, errors, and increased latency.

However, as of March 4, 2026, the specific cause of these disruptions had not been identified by Oracle.

The majority of complaints, approximately 52%, related to issues with the TikTok app itself, followed by difficulties uploading or publishing content at 32%, and search functionality issues at 9%.

This TikTok outage is not the first involving Oracle.

It is the second Oracle-related disruption affecting TikTok's US operations in the past two months.

The previous incident happened in late January 2026, days after the TikTok USDS Joint Venture deal closed.

The previous disruption in January was caused by a weather-related power outage at an Oracle data center, which triggered a "cascading system failure."

However, the cause of this latest disruption remains unclear.

The formation of the TikTok USDS Joint Venture is a strategic move to comply with national security laws that require ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, to divest its TikTok US business or face a ban.

Oracle plays a central role in this ownership structure.

Oracle is part of a group of investors that collectively owns an 80% stake in this joint venture, along with Silver Lake and MGX (UAE).

The deal to divest TikTok US to this joint venture of American investors is reportedly valued at approximately US$14 billion.

This landmark deal is expected to close on January 22, 2026.