Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, told CNBC that the daily average of U.S. users uninstalling TikTok has surged nearly 150% over the past five days compared with the previous three months. The spike follows last Thursday’s announcement that TikTok would form a new joint venture to continue operating in the U.S. under American leadership, naming Adam Presser—formerly TikTok’s head of operations—as CEO of the new entity.
The announcement prompted skepticism among some users, particularly after being asked to agree to an updated privacy policy on Thursday. Several social media posts highlighted language in the new policy outlining the types of data TikTok may collect, including sensitive information such as “your racial or ethnic origin” and “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.”
Despite the uproar, the controversial language does not appear to be new. An archived version of the policy from August 2024 includes the same provisions, suggesting that the updated policy merely resurfaced existing terms.
Nevertheless, the renewed attention appears to have affected user sentiment and contributed to a spike in app uninstalls over recent days.
“If I can delete my biggest platform because their terms of agreement and censorship have gotten out of control, so can you!” creator Dre Ronayne posted on Threads, the micro-blogging service owned by Meta. Ronayne said she had nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok before deleting her account on Sunday.
Other creators also reported issues posting to the app, with users complaining about outages and failed video uploads. TikTok has not provided clarity to creators on what the joint venture means for them, Nadya Okamoto, a TikTok creator with over 4 million followers, told CNBC.
“That’s why there is so much paranoia, because we’re all kind of looking at this platform and we just don’t know what’s happening,” she said.
Okamoto said she has experienced app problems over the past several days and has been unable to upload videos for roughly 24 hours. During the uncertainty, she has continued to post content on Instagram and Google’s YouTube.
“Online there’s a lot of conversation about — is this all coincidence or censorship, and what does this look like?” Okamoto said. “For everything to be happening at once, it is very scary.”
On Monday, an X account associated with the TikTok joint venture said the service disruption was caused by a power outage at a U.S. data center.
“We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon,” the account wrote.
Despite the rise in uninstalls, U.S. usage has remained steady. Sensor Tower data shows TikTok’s active user levels in the U.S. remained relatively flat compared with the previous week.
However, competing apps have seen increased interest. Sensor Tower reports that U.S. downloads for UpScrolled rose more than tenfold compared with the prior week, while Skylight Social increased 919% and Chinese-owned Rednote climbed 53% week over week.
TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.