Why Your TikTok Feed Is Repeating Videos — And What Changed Behind the Scenes

If your TikTok turned into a weird little loop over the weekend of Jan. 24 and 25, with old videos and random posts you swear you already watched, you weren’t imagining it. A pile-up of technical problems hit the app at the same time as a major U.S. ownership shift and fresh Terms and Privacy updates. Your For You Page felt all of it.

Creators and regular users reported that TikTok’s FYP stopped feeling personalized. Some users couldn’t upload at all. Posts sat “under review” for hours. Others dealt with login issues and comments that refused to load. TikTok didn’t publicly confirm the outage right away, which left everyone piecing it together in real time.

TikTok confirmed it finalized a deal to keep operating in the U.S. by creating a new, majority American-owned entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. That shift lined up almost exactly with when users started noticing their feeds acting strange.

According to Reuters, ByteDance keeps a 19.9 percent stake in the app, while major investors like Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX each hold significant shares. The new entity now takes responsibility for U.S. data security and key operations tied to American users. TikTok said it will operate under “defined safeguards,” including protections around “algorithm security” and “content moderation.”

Around the same time the feed started acting funny, U.S. users saw that familiar “agree to continue” screen. TikTok pushed out updated Terms of Service and a new privacy policy before you could keep scrolling.

According to Wired, the updated privacy policy includes three notable shifts. TikTok now says it may collect approximate or precise location if you enable location services, whereas it previously said current U.S. versions didn’t collect precise GPS data. The policy now explicitly covers data tied to TikTok’s AI tools, including user prompts and AI-generated outputs. The app also expanded its advertising language, spelling out broader data usage for ad measurement and delivery, with publishers referenced as partners in that ecosystem.

None of those updates automatically means TikTok will start recycling your feed. However, rolling out major legal and product changes at the same time as a massive corporate transition can easily cause platform instability.

But if you just want it to stop, you can try a few quick, non-mythical fixes when TikTok’s FYP feels unstable. First, update the app, because recommendation bugs often ride along with older versions and get patched quietly. Next, clear TikTok’s cache in your in-app settings and restart the app to give the system a clean slate. You can also actively re-train your feed. Skip what you don’t like quickly. Search for the content you actually want to see. Linger on videos that really hit. And if TikTok’s systems caused the chaos that weekend, you didn’t “break” your algorithm — TikTok did.