Seems Like American TikTok’s Issues Are Sending Customers Flocking to Alternate options

Based on Appfigures, the top five free iPhone apps right now in the U.S. are:

1. ChatGPT
2. JumpJumpVPN
3. V2Box
4. UpScrolled
5. Threads

Yesterday, Apple blogger John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted the general hottest iPhone apps for all of 2025, and the highest 5 had been:

1. ChatGPT
2. Threads
3. Google
4. TikTok 
5. WhatsApp

I’m not the first person to point this out, nevertheless it’s not precisely a stretch to deduce that the three apps which have out of the blue squeezed in between ChatGPT and Threads are on the checklist as a result of dissatisfaction with TikTok. Two are VPN apps, which might theoretically be used to entry TikTok from a digital community in a rustic the place the U.S. model of TikTok is pointless, and one, UpScrolled, is an Australian video and text sharing app that recently went viral.  

To refresh your reminiscence on what’s occurring with TikTok, after years of attempting to pressure Chinese language-owned ByteDance to relinquish possession and let a U.S.-friendly purchaser take over, a legal entity was created earlier this month that may take possession of TikTok, with Adam Presser as its new CEO. This permits TikTok to adjust to a brand new U.S. regulation basically requiring TikTok to be run by a U.S. firm or be banned.

However this entity, a posh joint company enterprise in command of U.S. operations for TikTok, seems from the surface to be struggling to keep everything in order, amid the handoff from TikTok’s Singapore base of operations (U.S. TikTok data was already largely housed in the U.S., so it’s not clear if this transition truly entails any massive, burdensome knowledge transfers).

Based on an X post from TikTok, the issue is that there’s been “a significant infrastructure challenge triggered by an influence outage at one in every of our U.S. knowledge heart companion websites,” and there could also be varied glitches, service slowdowns, failures, and points with person metrics. Oracle has additional clarified that the TikTok challenge stems from a weather-related blackout at one of its data centers. Oracle owns 15 percent of the new TikTok U.S. venture.

The problems TikTok is referring to dovetail properly with the descriptions of issues described by customers likw movies that sit in evaluation indefinitely, and posts that get low or zero view counts, typically regardless of excessive numbers for different engagement metrics like feedback or shares. Different general issues that fit with an information heart interruption embrace a attainable lack of analytics in TikTok Studio, livestreamers apparently getting random messages saying they should cease streaming instantly, and irrelevant search outcomes.

Nevertheless, the hiccups at TikTok are, at the very least partially, being perceived because the technical penalties of a right-wing takeover. That’s partially as a result of that 15 p.c of TikTok U.S. now held by Oracle is managed by the right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, and the possession transition is in fact being shepherded along by the Trump Administration. And that’s to not point out the truth that the Biden-era push to ban TikTok emerged amid paranoia that it was turning the youth into Maoist, Hamas-supporting terrorists.

However have the principles on TikTok tangibly modified? For all anybody is aware of, no. It has re-emerged prior to now few days that sooner or later prior to now, new TikTok CEO Adam Presser talked publicly about an idiosyncratic and clunky moderation apply round Israel—treating the word “Zionist” as hate speech if it carries negative connotations. However this isn’t some new TikTok coverage rolling out to coincide with the transition to U.S. possession (though, relatively troublingly, at least one answer on X from Grok strongly implies that it is). It’s extra doubtless a part of a rule change round Zionism that apparently rolled out in 2024.

Gizmodo reached out to TikTok’s U.S. three way partnership for clarification in regards to the causes of the platform’s latest issues. In a reply, we acquired hyperlinks to statements on X, together with the one from Oracle. We adopted up, particularly asking if any content material guidelines had been modified because the possession transition. We are going to replace if we hear again.

Round Sunday, TikTok customers began writing that they felt like their political posts had been being censored.

“TikTok has been beneath new management for like a day and I made a slideshow with posts from the ICE rally in the present day and it instantly bought out beneath evaluation and isn’t being revealed,” wrote Bluesky user @pnwpolicyangel.bsky.social.  

Instagram user erinmayequade wrote:

“TikTok is cooked. They gained’t even submit my final two movies — I can see them, however anybody else who goes to my profile gained’t even see them. In a single day, our federal authorities has silenced and suppressed dissent [on] one in every of our largest platforms. Not simply content material, however the whole lot from sure individuals.”

It will be company malpractice to roll out such insidious and restrictive insurance policies proper out of the gate like this, notably amid the present backdrop of political upheaval. As soon as once more, TikTok nonetheless has not commented on this hypothesis from a few of its customers.

But when it’s true that customers are flocking to different choices for political causes regardless of no arduous proof that the brand new TikTok U.S. three way partnership has already begun some type of crackdown on political speech, that additionally doesn’t essentially imply they’re misled. They could simply count on modifications alongside the traces of what occurred at Twitter when Elon Musk took over. Content material requirements there took a hard right turn very quickly. So with that in thoughts, some TikTok customers would possibly simply be leaving preemptively on the first signal of an annoying glitch with the intention to keep away from enduring even worse modifications that they understand to be on the horizon.