TikTok Faces Major Outage in the U.S., Leaving Millions Frustrated
At 4:30 p.m. ET, the site stopped working, and thousands of people began sharing their issues on Downdetector, where 32,000 complaints cropped up quickly. The biggest issues reported were about not being able to open the app, with many also noticing problems with server connections. In particular, New York, Washington D.C., Houston, and Seattle all suffered from either total or occasional service outages. When TikTok faced the outage, the support team did not post any updates on their channels.
TikTok Outage: More Than 32,000 Users Report Issues With Apphttps://t.co/3bjIxLI2aZ pic.twitter.com/EsV16CGz6t
— Forbes (@Forbes) May 15, 2025
Thousands Report TikTok Down, Frustrations Spill onto Social Media
As soon as TikTok went down, users took to Twitter to discuss and poke fun at the outage. As of 2024, TikTok’s U.S. audience had reached 170 million users, with most looking to the platform for both entertainment and creating their own content. No one from TikTok contacted us, as their support account has been inactive since July 2021, and the same was true for their communications team. Despite some people being able to access the app for a short period, the service was stilted until around 8:00 p.m. ET.
Political Uncertainty Around TikTok Continues Among Outage
It comes as TikTok is facing increased uncertainty in the United States. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok from China, now faces pressure as a result of a new Senate bill that would force the app to either sell to a U.S. firm or risk being banned. Former President Trump pushed the sale deadline back by 75 days in April, making it May 5 for ByteDance to respond. China apparently stopped the talks when the United States started imposing new tariffs. Because of political issues, people are now even more worried about TikTok’s staying power in the country.
