Is TikTok down now? Users across major US cities report outage, Downdetector shows

TikTok users in several major US cities reported what appeared to be an outage starting Tuesday afternoon, March 3, with one of the most widely reported issues being the app glitching and crashing when users attempted to search for content. The disruptions quickly sparked questions such as “is TikTok down right now?” and “TikTok down” across social media platforms.


Some social media users also shared a screenshot of the outage, saying they can't check their "TikTok sound either"



According to DownDetector, reports of disruptions began climbing just before 1 p.m. ET on Tuesday, March 3. By around 8:30 p.m. EST, the number of outage reports had crossed 2,000. Cities including New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles were among the hardest hit, along with San Diego, Phoenix, Houston, Washington, and Minneapolis, the DownDetector outage map showed.

Most user complaints pointed to problems with the TikTok app itself. Data from DownDetector indicated that 52% of users reported app-related issues, 32% faced problems with posting or publishing content, and 9% experienced difficulties with search.

TikTok acknowledged the issue earlier in a post on X, stating, “Creators may temporarily experience lags in posting content while Oracle works to resolve the issue." A separate post from Oracle on X suggested that the outage began around the same time.

When will TikTok be back? Here is Oracle has to say

The Oracle System Status page confirmed at 8:50:11 p.m. EST, a service disruption affecting Oracle Cloud Network Infrastructure in the US East (Ashburn) region. The incident began at 1:24 p.m. UTC on Tuesday, March 3.

Oracle said engineers had identified the issue and taken steps to stabilize the underlying services supporting the affected network infrastructure and are “now proceeding with further mitigation efforts." “Customers may be intermittently experiencing connection timeouts, errors, and increased latency when attempting to perform OCI service operations,” the page noted.

Oracle plays a key role in TikTok’s US operations. The company is part of an investor group that owns 80% of the TikTok USDS Joint Venture. TikTok reported a similar outage in January, attributing it to a winter storm that affected a significant Oracle data center.