TikTok is facing a probe in the US following claims the social media platform is censoring critical posts and users following its change of ownership.

California governor Gavin Newsom said that the state will begin an investigation into whether TikTok is censoring political content that is critical of President Trump and his allies.

Since ByteDance was forced to divest its majority ownership of TikTok’s operations in the US, a group of investors, and US firm Oracle, owned by Trump ally Larry Ellison, took over the majority stake of the company.

Less than a week later, US TikTok users raised complaints that content critical of the president, his policies, or associated were being suppressed across the platform.

Users reported that they were blocked from using the word ‘Epstein’, the surname of the late convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein, and the title of the files that US law makers and citizens have pressed to have revealed to the public.

Users also claim that videos showing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and associated protests against them have been blocked on the platform.

While users on X provided screenshots showing TikTok saying that a message with ‘Epstein’ was blocked for being ‘in violation of our Community Guidelines’, and a Senator from California saying his post about ICE was blocked, TikTok alleges that this is all routed in “major infrastructure” issue.

“While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve together with our data centre partner,” TikTok said in a statement, claiming the issues were due to a power outage at a US data centre.

“You may notice multiple bugs, slower load times, or timed-out requests, including when posting new content. Creators may temporarily see ‘O’ views or likes on videos, and your earnings may look like they’re missing. This is a display error caused by server timeouts,” the statement continued.

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However, Newsom said that his government has received confirmation from independent and verified reports that TikTok is suppressing content that is critical of Trump and his policies.

“Following TikTok’s sale to a Trump-aligned business group, our office has received reports – and independently confirmed instances – of suppressed content critical of President Trump,” the governor wrote on X.

The California governor has been a consistent critic of President Trump, especially since ICE raids torrented Los Angeles in June last year.

It remains unclear what exactly may be causing the issues on TikTok, as users reported issues not only with possible censorship but also speed and glitches.

DownDetector received over 600,000 reports of issues from US users of TikTok between Saturday and Monday, the BBC was told.

Users shared struggles with search, loading videos, slow speeds, issues accessing monetisation tools, and having their videos having worse visibility to users despite no prior issues.