Visitors and Unsecured Storage Devices Found in TikTok’s Virginia Data Centers

According to a Forbes report, there have been numerous serious security lapses at TikTok's Virginia data center. The publication discovered numerous serious issues at the ByteDance facilities as well as blatant connections to the company's Chinese operations based on numerous interviews and more than 60 photos, videos, and other information from the data centers. Unaccompanied visitors, unidentified flash drives plugged into servers, and boxes of unattended hard drives littered the hallways of the data centers. Interviewees attributed it to the social media company's hasty expansion of storage capacity and cost-cutting. The business leases space in Northern Virginia, and ByteDance and contract employees from various unnamed data center management companies staff its data halls.

Three different sources told Forbes that server alterations were made to servers that were not in such configurations, and four said they had seen unmarked and "unticketed" flash drives plugged into servers. ByteDance uses numerous record-keeping processes to track server and other hardware repairs. Four more sources claimed that the business's degaussers, which are used to wipe and destroy old hard drives, were frequently defective. This meant that employees took the drives to other data centers to destroy them, preventing anyone from leaving with the drives if they so desired. Additionally, six different sources confirmed to Forbes that they had heard of employees using company servers to mine cryptocurrencies.

The servers in the data center were revealed to be made by Inspur. This Chinese server manufacturer has recently been placed on the US government's blacklist but has historically maintained close ties with Western businesses and been widely used. Documents also reveal that Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd., a ByteDance a division partially owned by the Chinese government, sent server work orders to data center staff members as recently as last week. TikTok has asserted time and time again that the Chinese government has no control over its business. The organization attributed the work orders to "an artifact of a ticketing system," which "does not give any insight into user data."