TikTok glitches raise censorship claims, company cites storm outage

TikTok experienced widespread outages across the United States during a major winter storm, leading to user reports of stalled feeds, failed searches, and missing hashtags. The disruptions coincided with heightened political tensions following recent ICE operations and protests in Minneapolis, fueling speculation that TikTok was censoring content related to immigration enforcement. Some users noted that searches about the protests returned inconsistent or unrelated results, intensifying fears of government interference. These concerns were exacerbated by TikTok’s recent U.S. spin-off, mandated by federal authorities to reduce ByteDance’s ownership stake amid national security scrutiny. TikTok denied any censorship, attributing the outages to a power failure at a U.S. data center that impacted TikTok and other apps it operates. The company apologized and said engineers were working with data center partners to restore service stability. The outages aligned with broader storm-related power losses affecting over a million Americans, and some users regained full access within hours while others continued to experience issues. Additionally, TikTok’s updated privacy policy