TikTok has restored US services after winter storms hit an Oracle datacenter - the same infrastructure that Big Red's founder Larry Ellison previously claimed doesn't go down.

The American arm of the social media biz says it running normally following a significant outage caused by Winter Storm Fern.

In an [1]update on X , TikTok's US owners said the bad weather led to a power outage that caused network and storage issues at an Oracle datacenter site, which affected "tens of thousands of servers" that keep TikTok running in the US.

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While the storm was described as unusually large and severe, we note that Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison [3]previously boasted to analysts in 2022 that "our cloud is very secure and extremely reliable," and "doesn't go down."

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The outage meant it wasn't a great first week for Tik Tok in the US, which is now owned by the [6]TikTok USDS (US Data Security) Joint Venture . Oracle - which also hosts the platform - holds a 15 percent stake in this entity, alongside private equity firm Silver Lake, and Emirati-backed investment firm MGX. China-based developer of TikTok, ByteDance, has retained a minority stake.

Bytedance was forced into this deal by the US government, which [7]threatened a complete ban of TikTok unless it agreed to sell to new owners acceptable to the Washington administration.

[8]US ownership of TikTok off to a rocky start as outage continues into second day

[9]Oracle, Michael Dell, named as investors in JV that will run TikTok's US operations

[10]Oracle gets to store US users' TikTok data, says Trump

[11]One of TikTok's network boffins says it causes 'massive data wastage'

In other Big Red news, Oracle disclosed that it [12]needs to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in cash to fund expansion of its cloud infrastructure, saying that additional capacity is necessary to meet the contracted demand from customers including AMD, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, TikTok, and others.

Reports suggest that [13]Oracle's shares declined sharply following the news amid investor concern over the scale of the borrowing. Last week, financial services biz TD Cowen warned [14]Oracle may to cut up to 30,000 jobs and sell off assets due to its AI datacenter financing challenges.

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As for TikTok, since coming under new ownership it has drawn criticism from users that [16]claim it is censoring certain content , including [17]messages with keywords such as "Epstein" and the protests against ICE in Minneapolis. ®

Get our [18]Tech Resources



[1] https://x.com/tiktokusdsjv/status/2018090603582554366?s=20

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aYDYNXvsz1Yu8dTPhR2gmAAAAIw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/13/oracle_clouds_never_go_down/

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aYDYNXvsz1Yu8dTPhR2gmAAAAIw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aYDYNXvsz1Yu8dTPhR2gmAAAAIw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/23/jv_announces_tiktok_us_acquisition/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/18/trump_extends_tiktok_reprieve_again/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/26/tiktok_outage_datacenter_power/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/23/jv_announces_tiktok_us_acquisition/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/23/oracle_gets_to_store_us/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/23/short_video_prefetch_research/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/02/oracle_cloud_expansion_investment_plan/

[13] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/02/oracle-stock-price-funding-plans.html

[14] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/oracle_td_cowen_note/

[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aYDYNXvsz1Yu8dTPhR2gmAAAAIw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[16] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/30/tiktok-us-takeover-new-type-of-censorship

[17] https://x.com/Furbeti/status/2015823717503324425

[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/