TikTok goes down in global outage affecting thousands of users
Thousands of TikTok users were unable to access the Chinese-owned social media platform.
On Thursday, over 8,000 users had reported issues with the platform starting at around 9.30 am, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.
The outage seems to be primarily affecting the app with many users unable to access their feed or For You Pages.
People promptly took to Twitter to complain about the issue, with the hashtag #TikTokdown trending.
On Wednesday TikTok had just announced it was opening two more data centres in Ireland and Norway to create a ‘secure European enclave’ for UK and EEA TikTok user data.
The popular app owned by Bytedance is amping up its data protections in Europe as it inches closer to a ban in the US over national security concerns.
Just this week, the White House backed a bill to give US president Joe Biden the power to ban TikTok for being a ‘national security threat’.
It’s not the first time the app has faced bans by governments due to its links to Beijing.
The UK parliament’s TikTok account was shut down last year after MPs raised concerns about the social media firm’s links to China.
In 2020, India banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps as tensions erupted betweet the two countries at the border.
Metro.co.uk has reached out to TikTok for comment.
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