Silicon Valley: TikTok suffered a major outage across the United States Saturday, halting video feeds and login access for millions of users. This prompted a viral backlash of memes on rival platform X (now Twitter). The disruption, peaking around 2 PM EST, left popular “For You” pages blank and search functions frozen, frustrating both influencers and casual scrollers alike.
Reports flooded Downdetector with over 50,000 complaints within hours, mostly in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Users faced endless loading screens or error codes, with many speculating on server overloads or cyberattacks. While acknowledging the issue via its status page, Tiktok stated teams were “actively investigating”. It, however, gave no timeline for resolution. By late afternoon, partial service returned for some East Coast users. Feeds in the Midwest continued to remain erratic, though.
The outage erupted resulted a meme war on X, where netizens pivoted seamlessly. Hashtags like #TikTokDown, #BlankForYouPage, and #XWins trended globally, featuring edits of celebrities staring at empty screens. One viral post quipped, “TikTok crashed so hard even my existential dread has buffering,” amassing 2 million views.
This marks TikTok’s third major US glitch in 2026, following holiday-season lags blamed on traffic surges. Amid ByteDance’s ownership scrutiny and US President Donald Trump’s renewed ban threats, skeptics tied the blackout to regulatory pressure or rival sabotage. Cybersecurity experts, however, point to routine API failures from rapid user growth—now at 170 million monthly US actives.
As feeds flickered back, creators raced to repost content, but the episode highlighted platform fragility. X CEO Linda Yaccarino celebrated the influx, tweeting, “When one scrolls, the other soars.”
