Is TikTok Down (Or Is It Just You)? Here's How To Tell
At this point, millions of people have thoroughly implemented TikTok into the fabric of their everyday lives. According to Statista, the service will have an estimated 955.3 million users by 2025. This number, alarmingly close to one-eighth of the world's current total population, means that an outrageous number of people are reliant on the app for their entertainment, moments of procrastination, distractions during bathroom visits, and more.
As such, it's incredibly debilitating when such a popular service suffers an outage, even a momentary one. Users and profit-hungry companies have just one thought: getting everything back up and running as soon as humanly possible.
For users, it's a matter of first determining whether the site or service, as a whole, has gone down or whether it's simply an issue with their internet (not that this is necessarily a simple dilemma by any means). For the ardent legions of TikTok enthusiasts everywhere, here are some methods to determine which kind of issue you're facing when you can't log into the often-controversial TikTok.
Check your internet connection
When failing to log into an app or other service, a user's first thought will typically be that their internet connection has gone down. This is an issue that even those with the fastest connections and latest routers will face, sadly.
The first step to determine whether a lack of access to TikTok is a you problem, then, is to check whether your broadband is active elsewhere. Can you get online on your computer, smartphone, tablet, game console, or other device? If not, and you've opened up the settings to disconnect and connect again to no avail, you can move on to investigating the problem at the source: your router itself.
If your particular model has a reset button (as many Xfinity routers with their potentially confounding orange lights do), hold it and wait for the router to reboot. If not, the age-old method of switching it off, waiting for a minute or so, and switching it on again can be applied. Trying via mobile data is also recommended as a convenient way of discovering whether it's your connection or the app itself.
Needless to say, this is all moot if you're away from home and using another connection, but if you've tried these steps and can't get online, your network seems to be the issue. It's probably time to check for any communication from your service provider (in the case of a wider outage) or reach out to them yourself.
If other internet users are making a fuss, it's surely TikTok itself
If, however, you can access the internet generally, and it's only TikTok that isn't working for you, you can use that very internet to investigate the issue further. Typically, of course, if one of the web's most popular services is experiencing an outage, there's going to be a furor about it elsewhere online.
Twitter (now, X) users should swiftly find that if TikTok is trending and they're unable to access it, so are lots of other people. As @narutoi_ put it during a TikTok outage on March 29, 2023, "No your wifi is fine and yes TikTok is down #tiktokdown." The addition of the hashtag, whether it caught on or not, underscores how very helpful other social media services can be at pointing out, at a glance, whether another is down.
Depending on the social media services you use, how widespread the outage is, and other factors, though, it may not be immediately clear. If this is the case, it's time to further broaden your search.
Dedicated services for pinpointing outages
When a service provider is conducting work in your area that may render your service intermittent or unavailable for a time, they'll typically do you the courtesy of forewarning you. While this isn't an option with unforeseen outages, providers still offer ways of determining whether an area is affected by such. Verizon, for instance, provides customers with a Service Outage Information page.
The same is often true with social media services. TikTok aficionados have several dedicated tools at their disposal, such as updownradar.com. Inputting "TikTok" into the search bar and clicking Check Website reveals the Server Status, Status Code, and Response Time for the site in question. By scrolling down, users can also see if others have reported issues over the last 24 hours and the times of such reports.
For a more widely-used service, downdetector.com can also be searched using the search bar on the top right of the page. This website gathers reports over the same time period and flags instances "only ... when the number of problem reports is significantly higher than the typical volume for that time of day." By using these handy tools, it's easier to determine whether there's a TikTok outage, even if it isn't one that the rest of the internet is lamenting from the rooftops.