TikTok, the popular short-form mobile video app, was inaccessible to users in several countries around the world for about two hours on Tuesday afternoon, including Canada, India, South Korea, Kenya, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
The outage started around 5 PM East Africa Time, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks internet disruptions, and users reported that it was showing the error message “Something Went Wrong” before the services were back up towards 7 PM.
For all that time, many people were reporting issues trying to view recent posts or create new posts on the ByteDance-owned app, but now, things seem to be working consistently again.
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Even so, the impact was far-reaching and severe. TikTok has built itself into an indispensable mobile communication and entertainment app with messaging, live streaming, video recording, video editing, sounds and voice-overs and many other digital services. Globally, it has nearly 1.6 billion active monthly users, with 121.5 million active monthly users in the United States and about 60 million in Africa.
In Kenya, TikTok is synonymous with the youth, who use it to communicate with friends and family, distribute viral content and trends, and create, share and discover short videos.
The last major TikTok outage occurred just over a year ago when it went down for about five hours in November 2022.
