TikTok is back! Here’s how six Philadelphians reacted to the short-lived outage

TikTok went dark for over 12 hours — and many fans of the social media site in Philadelphia weren’t happy.

The short-lived drought of lip-synced videos and makeup tutorials came after the company voluntarily shut down its app in the United States on Saturday night, after a Supreme Court ruling that upheld a congressional ban passed last year.

Forcing Chinese-based parent company ByteDance to sell the social media platform became a major talking point for Republicans, who cast it as a Trojan horse for spying or the dissemination of propaganda.

Attempts to access TikTok, which has about 170 million users in the United States, resulted in an error message acknowledging the ban.

But the ban proved temporary — at least for now.

As of Sunday afternoon, TikTok announced it would restore its U.S. services based on President-elect Donald Trump’s promised executive order.

“Welcome back! Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” a message now reads upon opening the app.

Yet even the temporary suspension of service evoked a mixture of anger to indifference from six Philadelphians interviewed Sunday morning.

Here’s what they had to say about their brief TikTok-less lives:

Any other morning Eric Melton, 18, would have been scrolling through TikTok until his bus arrived at the corner of Chelten and Wayne Avenues. But Saturday night a pop-up appeared on the app.

“It was like ‘Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now,’ and I went, ‘Oh! It’s back to Instagram, I guess,’” Melton said, discarding competing short-form video site RedNote as an alternative.

As the hours went by, a sense of loss set in.

“Everybody went to TikTok during COVID. It was like a little app that we all kind of came together on and now they shut it down,” Melton said. “This feels kind of like a culture shutdown.”

YouTube shorts and Instagram reels served him as an alternative in the hours since the ban. But, they weren’t even enough to capture the teenager’s attention for a full morning. Eventually he switched to listening to music while he waited for a bus.

“I think I am better off putting all that time into crochet; I am making a little green blanket for my girlfriend, she doesn’t know it yet,” Melton said. “But, I hope TikTok comes back for sure.”

James Brown, walking past Smith Recreation Center, estimated he had regularly used the app for about a year.

Still, he was angry.

“It hurt seeing it go down,” said the 22-year-old from South Philadelphia.

He was frustrated he couldn’t even access existing videos he had saved to watch later. And Brown said he felt like he was being cut off from a valuable resource.

“I use it for informational stuff,” he said. “Especially cooking and learning little hacks, stuff like that.”

Ariel Baumet hasn’t been on TikTok since the end of COVID quarantine, but she was living the ban through her teenage daughter’s eyes.

“It’s important to validate their feelings,” Baumet said. “People have a hard time with it because they’ve really built communities through this platform, it’s almost like they are grieving.”

The app’s endless, fast-paced scroll was incompatible with the teacher’s lengthy attention span. But she still understood how the ban could trigger negative emotions in users nationwide.

“They have authentic connections through this platform that if you’re not on [TikTok] you may not understand fully. It’s OK to feel pretty bad about losing that,” Baumet said. And for folks not affected by the ban, “it’s a good time to practice empathy,” she added.

Denise Ross, waiting for a bus in Point Breeze, had never even used TikTok. But she still felt the aftereffects of the ban through her two teenage children.

They were livid.

“They’re really upset about it. They used it every day,” she said.

While some proponents saw the ban as having the positive side effect of forcing youths off their phones and back to real life, Ross doesn’t share that view.

“That don’t bother me,” she said of their daily use of the app. “They enjoy it, it makes them happy.”

But Ross also said she thought the ramifications of the ban, even temporary, would be more far-reaching than annoyed teens.

“It’s going to be a big thing. There’s a lot of people who go on there to make money,” she said. “A lot of people are going to be very disappointed.”

Zane Foggie was shocked when he couldn’t unwind scrolling through TikTok on Saturday night.

“I thought I had more time on the app,” Foggie said with a note of sorrow.

As a teenager, he was used to spending about four hours a day on the app, particularly watching viral dances he didn’t dare to re-create, but found amusing. Yet, that is not what he expected to miss the most.

“It gave me easy access to a lot of information, and it just made things more convenient,” Foggie said. “TikTok opened my eyes to just different forms of life and different ways people can express themselves.”

Seeing this diversity from a young age made him more willing to get to know and listen to people with different interests than his own, Foggie said.

The ban made him reconsider spending so much time online.

“I should probably just reinvent myself and find more hobbies,” Foggie said.

Molly Thornton used to wake up and look for fashion and design inspiration on TikTok, until the app didn’t let her Sunday morning.

“I was a little upset at first, but I feel like overall it would be better for my well-being since I won’t spend as much time on my phone,” said the interior designer. “I am going to probably read more now, spend more time in my career, maybe even do pilates.”

Her boyfriend, Korey Turner, on the other hand, was saddened to see small businesses left without a main platform.

“As a small-business owner, I realized how much this is going to affect small businesses,” Turner said, hoping traffic generated by TikTok users moving to Instagram reels would get other small businesses discovered on the photo app.

As the pair headed to the grocery store Sunday morning to find a new post-TikTok normal, they also said ‘no’ to alternatives like RedNote, due to the language barrier.

Both said they hoped the ban would be short.

“I think they’re going to plan to bring TikTok back so I’m kind of holding out for that,” Thornton said.

Trump has already signaled his support for a resolution to the conflict over the social media platform.

The restoration of service followed a series of posts from Trump indicating he was amenable to a 90-day grace period.

“SAVE TIKTOK,” Trump posted on the social media site X on Saturday.

Yet the more long-term solution is hazier. Proponents of the ban have pushed for a sale, while Trump even floated the idea of the U.S. taking a 50% ownership stake in the app.

Foggie, the teen from Northwest Philadelphia, predicted a similar outcome even before the service came back online.

“Watch Trump come to office, reinstate it, and then take all the credit for it,” he said Sunday morning.