Today’s reports from Hunterbrook Media and Pablo Torre Finds Out claim the company’s hardware is seemingly easily obtained and popularly used in Russia’s war effort through already-sanctioned distributors and other middlemen.
Ubiquiti, which was fined $500k in 2014 over “reckless disregard” for Iran sanctions, did not respond to a request for comment.
Without explaining why its cloud status page doesn’t list any outages, TikTok USDS part-owner Oracle outed itself as the previously unnamed “US data center partner” that experienced a power outage over the weekend, blocking videos from publishing and unraveling its all-important algorithm for a few days.
Michael Egbert, Oracle Spokesperson:
Over the weekend, an Oracle data center experienced a temporary weather-related power outage which impacted TikTok. The challenges U.S. TikTok users may be experiencing are the result of technical issues that followed the power outage, which Oracle and TikTok are working to quickly resolve.
TikTok’s US service crashed early Sunday morning, and as of late Monday night, it still hasn’t fully recovered.
After finally announcing the problem started with a power outage at an unnamed partner’s data center, TikTok USDS followed up with an updated statement saying, “While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve together with our data center partner,” and listing some of the bugs users are experiencing. There’s still no ETA for a full fix.
Despite claims floating around social media, the truth is a bit more complicated, not least by the fact that TikTok in the US is still largely down, about a day and a half after its data center power outage problems started.
While tweets from random users, the governor of California, and PopBase claimed TikTok US DMs now censor “Epstein,” testing it from our end showed that its messaging feature bans many innocuous single-word messages, like “test.” Using the convicted sex offender’s name in a sentence, however, goes through unbanned.
Whether this is just a regular outage or a result of this week’s changes in management, reports tracked on Downdetector and Reddit confirm many people are having trouble loading TikTok right now.
If the mobile app loads, it’s not consistently showing comments or other features, and the algorithm managing the For You page doesn’t feel like it’s working correctly.
Update, January 26th: TikTok is still having problems in the US, which it says are connected to a data center power outage.
After Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong’s arrest in connection to a Minnesota church protest against ICE, someone behind the White House account on X decided to post a version edited to make it look like she had been crying.
The war on reality continues.
After an extended outage on Friday, the site formerly known as Twitter is tossing around error messages and/or entirely failing to load posts once again. Downdetector and NetBlocks are tracking the outage, and if there are any updates, we’ll follow up with them.
