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After years of delays, the forced sale of TikTok‘s USA operations from ByteDance to an American-based company went through last week with investors from Oracle, MGX, and elsewhere purchasing 80.1% of TikTok US operations while China-based ByteDance retains a 19.9% ownership stake. Immediately afterward, millions of US-based users reported TikTok broken across the board.
Why is TikTok broken all of a sudden? How badly did things unravel in such a short period of time? Let us take a look at what we know so far.
TikTok Broken For Countless American Users After Sale Went Through
For countless TikTok users opening their app on Saturday night and Sunday morning, they were met with a virtually unrecognizable app. Functionality such as ‘liking’ posts was not working as ‘likes’ would not register. Comments were not loading and unable to be seen by users. Anytime a ‘like’ would go through it would be deleted. In short, TikTok was broken.
Even worse were the algorithmic changes. What makes TikTok so successful is its algorithm. It is highly specific to each user, attuned to their interests, and constantly changing based on user’s activity within the app.
As an example, when a user watches a video to completion without scrolling to the next clip the algorithm detects that as interest. If they then do the same with additional videos the algorithm starts inputting many more of those videos into the user’s feed.
What happened to TikTok’s algorithm?
While they have not made any official announcements yet, users were baffled by their TikTok algorithms following the sale. Feeds were filled with videos from last year, outdated and off topic.
Instead of seeing interesting videos that were suggested based on user’s specific interests, it appeared that TikTok was merely suggesting the most popular viral videos over the past year regardless of whether or not a user would be interested in them.
According to the Pensacola News Journal, over 35,000 users had issued reports about TikTok on the popular website DownDetector as of 4am Sunday morning. An estimated 65% of users reported the app being entirely down while around 23% reported issues with their feed being disrupted.
As of this morning, anecdotally of course, I was still experiencing the same issues of ‘likes’ not registering, comments not loading, and my personal TikTok feed being unrecognizable to my interests. It feels almost as if all user behavior and engagement within the app was wiped after the sale and the previously omniscient algorithm hadn’t the slightest clue what I would like to see within the app.
Many users reported TikTok Creator tools and monetization being down after the sale.
They took away all the creator payment tools from TikTok , I’m screaming
— 5hahem (@shaTIRED) January 25, 2026
It seems as though they took away all the creator payment tools on TikTok US quintessentially demonetizing every stateside creator. 📉
— Dimplez 🇳🇬 (@Dimplez) January 26, 2026
There is no evidence at all that TikTok US is actually ‘demonetizing’ creators based in the United States. Evidence suggests this is merely part of the outages causing TikTok to appear broken to millions of users in the United States.
Presumably, TikTok US will be able to go from broken to fully functional again at some point in the near future. They were purchased by investors with the deepest of pockets (looking at you, Larry Ellison) who will not want to have purchased a lemon.
When TikTok is able to sort out its server issues remains to be seen. Until then, the complaints will continue across all social media platforms and nobody benefits more right now than Instagram Reels.