Incident Report: TikTok Publishing Failures

Severity: Major

Summary

On May 22, 2026, Buffer experienced a period of failed TikTok publishing caused by an outage on TikTok's side. Their API returned errors for both video and photo posts, which prevented affected posts from publishing. The disruption occurred in short bursts over roughly a one-hour window, with TikTok's API returning to normal by approximately 21:00 UTC. All other social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Pinterest, X/Twitter, YouTube, and Google Business) continued publishing normally throughout. Buffer's own infrastructure remained fully healthy for the entire period.

Customer Impact

Customers with TikTok posts scheduled during the affected window may have seen those posts fail to publish. The failures occurred in three short bursts (each lasting under five minutes) on May 22, with a higher concentration of errors earlier in the window. Both video and photo posts were affected.

Failed posts would have appeared as "failed" in the publishing queue and could be retried manually once TikTok's API recovered. Posting to all other connected social networks was unaffected.

Root Cause

The incident was caused by a third-party outage at TikTok. TikTok's API returned a generic error ("Something went wrong. Please try again later.") when Buffer attempted to create the media container required to publish a post. Because this affected both video and photo posts, it pointed to a broad, platform-level problem on TikTok's side rather than an issue with any specific post type or with Buffer.

This was corroborated by widespread external reports of TikTok problems on the same day, along with a separate multi-hour TikTok outage the day before.

Key Learnings

• The failures followed a distinct, repeating pattern that decayed quickly between bursts — characteristic of upstream instability rather than a sustained outage. When the expected next burst did not occur, it gave us a clear signal that TikTok's API had recovered.

• The issue was isolated entirely to TikTok publishing; all other networks remained at normal performance, which allowed us to confirm the cause quickly.

• Because the root cause was external, our response focused on monitoring for recovery and keeping customers informed rather than deploying an internal fix.

Future Improvements

While this outage originated outside of Buffer, we are evaluating several improvements to reduce the impact of similar TikTok-side disruptions in the future:

• Automatic retries with backoff for known transient TikTok errors, so posts have a chance to succeed on a later attempt during brief instability.

• Pause-and-defer handling that temporarily holds TikTok posts when repeated upstream failures are detected, preserving them for automatic retry once TikTok recovers, rather than letting them fail.

• Clearer failure messaging so that when a post does fail due to a TikTok-side issue, customers receive a more specific, helpful explanation.

• Earlier detection of TikTok degradation through improved monitoring of upstream error patterns.