TikTok grappled with a severe outage yesterday, causing disruption for thousands of users across the US.
On January 25, 2026, users engaged with the ByteDance-owned app reported frozen feeds, failed comments, upload issues, and repeated login loops.
As per DownDetector, the web-outage tracking site, reports exponentially rose to tens of thousands within a few years, primarily affecting the For You feed, notifications, and content posting.
At the time of writing, DownDetector now shows a sharp decline in reports, though the issue has not been completely resolved yet.
While the app often opened normally, it got stuck on point and couldn’t load new content—indicating partial service disruption instead of a complete shutdown.
Independent monitoring data revealed the issue was application-layered related, not a global internet failure.
Some experts mentioned the outage may be a result of misconfigured feature flags, cascading microservice failures, overloaded authentication gateways, or CDN cache issues.
Recent backend changes—such as updated Terms of Service and new operational structures, may have increased login traffic; however, TikTok has yet to officially confirm this.
Notably, this is not the first time TikTok users have faced similar issues, as the app users have experienced several disruptions last year.
