TikTok faces censorship claims, technical problems

The company said Monday it was experiencing a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage at one of its US data centre partner sites

Censorship claims, technical problems and a report of a surge in app deletions are just some of the challenges TikTok is facing as it adjusts to a new ownership structure in the US that was finalized last week.

The company said Monday it was experiencing a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage at one of its US data centre partner sites. The outage led to bugs such as creators temporarily seeing zero views on their videos even if people had looked at them, as well as slow load times and timeout requests when posting videos.

On Tuesday, TikTok said it had made significant progress restoring services though users could still see glitches while using the popular video sharing app.

Jamie Favazza, a spokesperson for TikTok’s new US joint venture, said it is inaccurate to say that the problems users have been encountering are “anything but the technical issues we’ve transparently confirmed.”

Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower said Tuesday that daily average app uninstalls grew 130% from January 22 to January 26 compared with the previous 30 days. However, daily average users still increased by 2% in the same period, which Sensor Tower says suggests the uninstalls had little effect on overall usage. And while TikTok lagged YouTube and Instagram in US user growth, people spent more time on the platform than its rivals.

Minda Smiley, a social media analyst at research firm Emarketer, noted that ownership change did just happen and that TikTok is going through a lot of infrastructure-related shifts, which can lead to technical issues. But if there are still problems with certain videos not uploading, or the censorship claims persist, TikTok could see bigger issues down the line.

Optics and perceptions are really important in situations like this, so I would stay like regardless of what’s actually happening, if people do feel as if content is being suppressed or content is difficult to upload or is being moderated or whatever it might be, that’s enough reason for a lot of users to flee or to stop using TikTok or to say they’re going to stop using TikTok, she said.