TikTok down: Social media giant restores app after hours of outage, but users observe ‘inaccurate’ likes count

TikTok confirmed that it had restored its online services following hours of reported outage. Many users took to other social media platforms to complain about issues that rendered the app temporarily unusable on Tuesday, July 6.

Tweets about the TikTok app not working properly flooded Twitter on Tuesday and got the hashtag #tiktokdown trending. The types of issues at the time seem to vary. Some users reported their feeds would not refresh, and no content would load. Others also experienced difficulties in going back to their accounts after logging out.

There were other less reported issues while TikTok was down. One user shared a screenshot showing the videos on the Favorites page were missing. People using multiple accounts also experienced issues switching from their main account to their other pages during the outage.

The TikTok outage took several hours until the official TikTok Support Twitter page posted an update around 9 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday. “Annnnnd we're back! Your app experience should be returning to normal. Thanks for bearing with us, everyone,” the social media company wrote.

While users seemed to be able to log in again, new problems were observed. Immediate replies to TikTok Support’s tweet suggested several users observed significantly lower views than normal after the app services were restored on late Tuesday. One user said content they posted only had 133 views after three hours but claimed they usually get around 10,000 views in that duration.

Some of them have complained about the “inaccurate” number of likes on their content. A number of users noticed that the likes on their pages were cut by half after TikTok restored its services.

Based on the responses from other users, it appears that the problem of reduced likes and fewer-than-normal views is a widespread issue. However, TikTok has yet to clarify if these are the results of a new set of issues or if these are still part of the problems that caused the Tuesday outage.

It can be recalled that TikTok was facing the threat of getting banned from the United States following an executive order Donald Trump signed last August that cited national security concerns. The order was, however, revoked by US President Joe Biden last month.

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