It Looks Like America’s TikTok Problems Are Sending Users Flocking Other Ways
According to Appfigures, the top five free iPhone apps right now in the US are:
- ChatGPT
- JumpJumpVPN
- V2Box
- UpScrolled
- Threads
Yesterday, Apple blogger John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted the most popular iPhone apps of all of 2025, and the top five were:
- ChatGPT
- Threads
- TikTok
I’m not the first person to point this out, but it’s not a stretch to say that the three apps that suddenly came between ChatGPT and Threads are listed because of dissatisfaction with TikTok. Two are VPN apps, which can be used to access TikTok from a virtual network in a country where the US version of TikTok is not needed, and one, UpScrolled, is an Australian video and text sharing app that has recently gone viral.
To refresh your memory on what happened with TikTok, after years of trying to force Chinese-owned ByteDance to relinquish ownership and let a US-friendly buyer take over, an official entity was formed earlier this month to take over TikTok’s ownership, with Adam Presser as its new CEO. This allows TikTok to comply with the new US law that requires TikTok to be managed by a US company or be banned.
But this organization, a joint venture that manages the US activities of TikTok, seems from the outside struggling to keep everything in order, during the provision of TikTok’s Singapore operating base (the data of US TikTok was already stored in the US, so it is not clear that this change involves any really difficult data transfer,).
According to X posted on TikTok, the problem is that there was a “major infrastructure problem caused by a power outage in one of our partner’s US data center locations,” and there may be various problems, service drops, failures, and problems with user metrics. Oracle also clarified that the TikTok issue stems from a weather-related outage in one of its data centers. Oracle owns 15% of the new TikTok US business.
The problems TikTok is referring to fit well with the descriptions of problems described by users such as videos that stay on forever, and posts that receive low or zero view counts, often despite high numbers of other engagement metrics such as comments or shares. Some common issues associated with data center outages include a possible lack of statistics in TikTok Studio, live streamers apparently receiving random messages saying they need to stop streaming immediately, and irrelevant search results.
However, the hiccups at TikTok are, at least in part, seen as the technical consequences of a right-wing takeover. That’s in part because the 15 percent of TikTok US now owned by Oracle is controlled by right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, and an ownership change is being cleared by the Trump Administration. And that’s not to mention the fact that the Biden-era push to ban TikTok arose amid paranoia that it was turning young people into Maoist, Hamas-backed terrorists.
But have the rules on TikTok changed significantly? Because everyone knows, no. It you have it also appeared a few days ago when some time ago, the new CEO of TikTok Adam Presser spoke publicly about the practice of moderate and ambiguous in Israel-treating the word “Zionist” as a hate speech if it has negative connotations. But this is not a new policy of TikTok coming out to coincide with the transition to US ownership (although, rather, worryingly, at least one response to X from Grok strongly states that it is). It is probably part of the legislative change regarding Zionism that apparently began in 2024.
Gizmodo reached out to TikTok’s US joint venture for clarification on the causes of the platform’s recent problems. In response, we found links to statements on X, including one from Oracle. We followed up, specifically asking if any content rules had changed since the ownership change. We will update when we hear back.
On Sunday, TikTok users began writing that they felt their political posts were being censored.
“TikTok has been under new leadership for a day and I made a slideshow of the post from the ICE meeting today and it quickly came out under review and was not published,” wrote Bluesky user @pnwpolicyangel.bsky.social.
Instagram user erinmayequade wrote:
“TikTok is ripe. They won’t even post my last two videos – I can see them, but anyone else who goes to my profile won’t even see them. Suddenly, our government silenced and suppressed the opposition. [on] one of our biggest platforms. Not just content, but everything from specific people. “
It would be unwise for business to roll out such sly and restrictive policies out of the gate, especially in the midst of political turmoil. Again, TikTok still hasn’t commented on this speculation from some of its users.
But if it is true that users are flocking to other options for political reasons despite strong evidence that the new United States TikTok has already begun some kind of reduction of political speech, that does not mean that they have been misled. They may expect changes following what happened at Twitter when Elon Musk took over. Content standards there have taken a serious turn very quickly. So with that in mind, some TikTok users may just leave before the first sign of an annoying problem to avoid having to endure even worse changes that they feel are imminent.
