Featured Image Credit: True Images / Cyberstock / Alamy
Topics: TikTok, Technology
Joe Harker
TikTok has left thousands of users despairing after the popular video app went down, leaving a huge number of people unable to watch anything on it.
It's always a nightmare when your favourite website stops working and for so many people online TikTok is a pretty fundamental part of their experience, and there have been thousands of complaints about the app suddenly not working.
The website Down Detector says it started having issues at around 9:40am GMT, with reported outages of the site suddenly spiking from pretty much nothing to thousands of instances.
With TikTok being such a fundamental part in the online habits of so many people, this is pretty much an international disaster so all we can do is send thoughts and prayers until it works properly again.
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Normally when this sort of thing happens it's all fine again within the span of a few minutes or perhaps a couple of hours, but that time without TikTok is going to be an agonising hell for the site's biggest fans.
Of course, with TikTok down all those internet-lovers have got to go somewhere else and Twitter was flooded with people searching for somewhere else to get their fix, as well as make sure it wasn't just them unable to use TikTok.
One person said they 'kept turning my wifi on and off' before realising the awful truth that it was the site itself which wasn't working properly.
Another lamented that they've 'got to watch insta reels like a peasant', perhaps slightly misjudging what life was like for our agricultural ancestors who spent their days farming and trying not to die of plague.
Someone else complained that they'd be watching YouTube shorts instead, and this may mark me out as an old man but I do wonder what's so bad about that.
It turns out that we're not great at coping with out favourite websites being done, and someone who said they 'keep opening TikTok only to remember it's down' will surely be hoping that one of these times they'll reopen the app and all will be well again.
Of course, there are some who will be glad that TikTok is down, at least momentarily, as there are fears that the popular site is essentially spyware for the Chinese government.
There have been calls in the US to ban the app from people's phones due to concerns that it's collecting user data.
TikTok recently announced plans to limit users below the age of 18 to just 60 minutes of screentime a day, though people will be able to opt out of this if they don't want to control their habit of spending hours watching video after video on the app.