David Pierce

Disney and Netflix, yeah.

David Pierce, I'm the editor-at-large at The Verge.

That is the big one.

It's also the most complicated one to sort through because fundamentally it's about feelings.

So a thing to understand is that everybody has always believed they're being censored on social media.

Since time immemorial, this is the story of social media.

What's happening on TikTok is at this particular moment, I believe less about censorship and more about normal internet problems.

Ooh.

There were a lot of people reporting that they would upload videos around what was happening in Minneapolis and those videos would get no views or those videos would actually not upload properly.

If you talk about ice or anything political, if you're even talking about the weather, zero views.

We're already seeing proof of suppression.

There were people who were saying that if you DMed the word Epstein to somebody else, that that wouldn't go through.

All of this is more easily and just as successfully explained by normal corporate ineptitude.

which is that TikTok's new data center provider, Oracle, had a huge outage.

What we think we know is that it was a big data center in Virginia had what they called a weather-related issue, which I live in Virginia, and I have spent a whole week having weather-related issues.

So I find that deeply relatable.

Oh, there's still snow on the ground where I'm from.

Yeah, I have a very hard time imagining anybody not having weather-related issues right now.

But so there was a big power outage.

They've had big issues at the data center, and that seems to be the actual culprit here.