While it’s back in the US, it seems to be a separate version from the rest of the world. My account is European and I can no longer log in within the US without a VPN out of the country. My GFs account is American and she can login but has lost access to some accounts and the ability to watch livestreams which my version of the app still has. I wonder if the 13 hour “outage” was for a larger scale data migration for a separate US version
I also can not see livestreams. It says "Unstable Network Connection". And I have 2 separate "air gapped" phones and TT accounts - no shared details and both behave the same.
There are lots of conspiracy theories online. However, I think it is just that the process of bringing the stack back up may be difficult. They also have a huge shopping network, that has also been down, and there are emails/communications to shops saying they are working on fixing it. Also, when I take a link from TikTok and post it in a downloader app, it no longer works since the URL is broken.
Maybe some microservices did not come back up (outage), or maybe they were knowingly compromised as part of the extension deal. While I can see that Lives can not be censored, I do not know the reason for shopping to be disabled, so I suspect it is an outage.
[ Actually shopping is also "live", so maybe that's why ]
Glad lives are back, I was actually inspecting the traffic using my PiHole from when my GF's US tiktok was browsing and when my European account was attempting to connect. Both of them his a CDN within the US but after that it looks like we had traffic going to different versions. Her's was routing to a tiktokv.us while mine was sending traffic to tiktokv. I'm not sure if this has been in place before or if I'm just realizing now but I believe a split-brain scenario is pretty likely.
Maybe it’s intentional, maybe it’s just the technical reality, it’s a bit early to call. We on a tech site ought to know what a shitshow split brain scenarios can be.
