Doomscrollers despair after Oracle hiccup knocks TikTok offline in US
An Oracle outage knocked parts of TikTok offline this week. The incident affected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which trails AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud in market share but counts the social media behemoth among its customers.
Big Red reported an issue at 1324 UTC on March 3. It said on its status page: "Customers may be intermittently experiencing connection timeouts, errors, and increased latency when attempting to perform OCI service operations."
The glitch affected the company's US East (Ashburn) region, and as March 3 rolled into March 4, Oracle engineers worked to understand what had happened and how to mitigate it. By 0703 UTC on March 4, the company confirmed that "service health metrics are showing recovery," having identified the root cause at 0044 UTC and rolled out mitigations.
Just another day for the public cloud and another cautionary tale for customers considering whether to throw their lot in with one cloud vendor or another. However, one consequence of Oracle's wobble was a corresponding failure for TikTok, the second since a winter storm took out one of Big Red's datacenters just over a month ago.
In the US, TikTok now operates under the TikTok USDS (US Data Security) Joint Venture, in which Oracle owns a 15 percent stake. Part of the deal involves Oracle hosting US user data in its cloud.
As a reminder, Oracle boss Larry Ellison boasted in 2022 that the company's cloud "doesn't go down." The words are ringing increasingly hollow, as some TikTok users can confirm.
The TikTok USDS Joint Venture posted on X (formerly Twitter): "An issue with an Oracle data center is impacting some parts of the TikTok U.S. user experience. Creators may temporarily experience lags in posting content while Oracle works to resolve the issue."
In response to an update in which Oracle assured customers it was "working quickly to restore normal service operation," a user complained: "do y'all ever plan on getting it back up?? this is ridiculous. 10hrs is not quickly restoring services." Another commented: "Couldn't you just stop touching stuff was working fine until you guys started."
By 0924 UTC on March 4, Oracle marked the issue as resolved.
The Register has contacted the company for an explanation and an assurance that TikTok will not be subject to a further interruption. We will update this piece should the company respond. ®
