TikTok, which is under new ownership in the United States, announced on Sunday that it has restored service following outages last week that affected user experiences.

The social network has more than 220 million users in the U.S.

The company attributed last week’s disruptions to a severe snowstorm that triggered an outage at an Oracle-operated data center responsible for TikTok operations in the country.

“We have successfully restored TikTok back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary U.S. data center site operated by Oracle. The winter storm led to a power outage which caused network and storage issues at the site and impacted tens of thousands of servers that help keep TikTok running in the U.S. This affected many of TikTok’s core features—from content posting and discovery to the real-time display of video likes and view counts,” the company said in a post on X.

In January, the U.S. finalized the deal to establish a separate entity for TikTok.

A U.S.-based investor consortium known as TikTok USDS acquired a controlling 80 per cent stake, while ByteDance retained the remaining 20 per cent ownership.

The finalization of the deal coincided with the snowstorm, during which users began experiencing widespread glitches.

Affected features included posting content, searching within the app, slower load times, and frequent time-outs.

TikTok noted that creators might see zero views on their posts until the issue was fully resolved.

The company later confirmed it was actively working to address the problem, though outages continued for several days and users repeatedly faced difficulties with posting content.

TikTok’s transition to the new ownership structure, combined with the app disruptions and user experience issues, created opportunities for competing social networks.

The Mark Cuban-backed short video app Skylight, built on the AT protocol, experienced a sharp increase in its user base, reaching more than 380,000 users during the week the deal was finalized.

Upscrolled, a social network developed by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, also rose significantly in App Store rankings, climbing to the second position in the social media category in the U.S.

According to analyst firm AppFigures, Upscrolled was downloaded 41,000 times within days of the TikTok deal’s finalization.