TikTok Goes Down Hard Like NyQuil Chicken
Having trouble getting TikTok to load on your smartphone? It's not just you. The social networking service that turns videos into viral sensations (some more worthy than others) suffered some kind of outage this morning, as panicked users went in search of answers on Twitter. The good news is, it appears to be back online for most people.
Looking at Downdetector, there was a massive surge in people report an outage with TikTok starting around 6:30am ET this morning. TikTok has not commented on the matter, and so it's unclear at the moment what caused the outage. Did someone trip over the power cord? Was a data center hit with a Sharknado?
Source: Downdetector
Whatever the reason, there was a moment of alarm and confusion for the TikTok faithful, some of whom assumed the worst.
"Thought my phone or something got hacked. Kept checking other apps and whatnot and then I found this website [Downdetector] and was relieved it's just the app itself and others are having the same issues as well," one person wrote.
"OMG I though I was banned or something," another person commented.
Others freaked out when the logged in and saw their videos missing, thinking they had someone been deleted. But fear now, your videos are intact (though we wouldn't be the last bit sad to see those dangerous NyQuil chicken challenge videos removed).
The timing of this outage is interesting, as it comes after TikTok announced it had begun increasing its video limit from three minutes to ten minutes for longer form content. TikTok had previously increased the limit from one minute to three minutes last July.
