US TikTok service restored after cloud 'that doesn't go down' went down

TikTok has restored US services after winter storms hit an Oracle datacenter - the same infrastructure that Big Red's founder Larry Ellison previously claimed doesn't go down. The American arm of the social media biz says it running normally following a significant outage caused by Winter Storm Fern. In an update on X, TikTok …

[heyrick]

Larry Ellison previously claimed doesn't go down

You know, the way the world is these days, there's going to be a bunch of people who will be "challenge accepted".

[nobody who matters]

"US TikTok service restored...."

That's a shame. The US has my sympathy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tens of thousands of virtual servers :o

Tens of thousands of virtual servers running on a single-point-of-failure. A distributed peer-to-peer configuration would be more reliant. But I figure a single centralized server cluster is easier to monitor, audit and control.

[PRR]

Does this storm-affected datacenter exist in a real world? Where?

[Bill Gray]

Where in the world?

Yeah, wondered about that myself. The only clue as to a meatspace location is the reference to 'Winter Storm Fern', a term I had not heard... despite being in the northeastern US and having spent more time than I'd care to think about shovelling out from it (oh, my aching back!) It's been a few years since we've had this much snow; I was astonished that we didn't lose power. But I digress.

The storm in question "caused deadly and catastrophic ice and snow impacts across a very long stretch of land, encompassing Northern Mexico to the Southern and Northeastern United States and into Canada. " So presumably, the faulty server(s) was/were in that range. Narrows things down a bit, doesn't it?

The Fine Article also gives no dates/times associated with this. The storm hit here about a week ago, and the above Wi__pædia link says "January 23 to 27". So, perhaps a nearly one-week outage?

[Syn3rg]

Re: Where in the world?

Oracle only has data centers in Ashburn, VA and Dallas, TX in storm's affected area. So it was most likely Dallas as they had a sizable outage and impassable streets.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Where in the world?

EPCOT, the provider in Texas, has never planned for severe weather and has little or no connections to other grids so blackouts in Texas are bigger than they are everywhere else.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where in the world?

Everything is bigger in Texas as they are everywhere else...

[mgb2]

Re: Where in the world?

Most of us in the US hadn't heard of "Winter Storm Fern" because we don't name non-tropical weather systems. The Weather Channel has persisted in trying to make it a thing. I don't blame the Reg authors for using the name because they are used to their storms having names, but they should learn that it's not actually a thing on this side of the pond.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Where in the world?

They should have called it "Winter Storm of America", of course!

[Eric 9001]

Wait, why does TikTok needs tens of thousands of servers?

Video streaming may be bandwidth intensive, but as you can serve at least 2000 clients per server with current hardware, I don't see why you would need more than >9000 servers for the population of the US?

Don't tell me there's more than 18,000,000 brains being rotted at a time in the USA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: more than 18,000,000 brains being rotted at a time in the USA?

Pretty sure that's a lowball count.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the USA owned/Oraclehosted version of TikTok went down, all good everywhere else...

Says something about the good ole "greed is good" corporate mantra, money over function/reliability...

Or, maybe they were installing the backdoors for the CIA/FBI/NSA...

[ecofeco]

I would not be surprised.

[Omnipresent]

tax payer surveillance

Being that the tickytocky is now part of the emperors new surveillance state, along with muskrats x. ai, and palantir, my guess is the tax payers are paying for all this illegality. They are eating the tax payers tax dollars, and it's tax season again, they are about to get a yuge payday!

[kmorwath]

Censorship on TikTok?

They just simply flip up the Chinese switch.

[BebopWeBop]

It's remarkable that the outage was particulrly effective at preventing coverage of the Mineappolis protests and murders. Maybe Trump does believe there is a god?