TikTok is off to a rough start just days after a group of mainly American investors approved by President Donald Trump took over control of the company's U.S. operations.
A growing number of users on Tuesday accused the platform of censoring certain political positions, including the word "Epstein."
Some claimed TikTok had begun censoring anti-Trump and anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement content.
The TikTok USDS Joint Venture said in a statement the issues were "triggered by a power outage at one of our U.S. data center partner sites."
"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," it added.
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.
The technical problems combined with the ties that some of the new owners have to Trump bristled some U.S. users enough to delete the app.
Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower said Tuesday that daily average app uninstalls grew 130% from Jan. 22 to Jan. 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 U.S. user growth, people spent more time on the platform than on its rivals.
The U.S. and Chinese governments last week signed off on a deal for TikTok to be acquired by a group of investors led by tech giant Oracle and investment firm Silver Lake.
TikTok last month signed off on the deal, which allows the app to continue to operate in the U.S. by addressing concerns about its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Under the agreement, ByteDance will have a 19.9% stake.
Oracle, Silver Lake, and the Emirati investment firm MGX will each hold a 15% share.
Another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, according to an internal memo sent out to employees by CEO Shou Zi Chew.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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