A lot of TikTok users woke up today to a nasty surprise. User videos throughout the site are vanishing for no apparent reason, due to an apparent glitch that’s affecting iPhone and Android users across the globe.
Usually, a user’s videos will appear in a large grid — depending on how many the user in question has uploaded — underneath the user’s profile, but those affected by the glitch are seeing nothing but a black area with a message reading “No Videos Yet.”
As is often the case with such glitches, TikTok is keeping mum on the issue. TikTok is no stranger to service-wide glitches; just a few weeks ago, many users were experiencing sounds vanishing mysteriously from their favorites tab, for instance. The unwritten policy seems to be to solve the problem as quickly as possible in-house, while avoiding any kind of social media reach-out to users. Often the best “fix” for a technical issue with TikTok is to merely wait until the IT workers at the company find and fix the problem.
Users worried that their videos have vanished forever likely don’t need to panic at this point. It’s more than likely that they are still “there,” with “there” being the servers they were stored on. The glitch is simply preventing user access, and once it’s fixed, the videos should show up under the user profile, just like they have in the past.
That said, there are a few things users can do to attempt to address the issue. First, attempt a hard reboot of your phone. Press and hold your power button for 20 seconds if you are an Android user. iPhone users should hold the sleep/wake button and volume down button simultaneously. Once the phone has powered down, press the power button, or the sleep/wake button, to restart.
If that doesn’t do the trick, you can also try clearing TikTok’s cache memory on your device. Just open TikTok, tap Profile in the bottom right, tap the 3-line icon in the top right, and tap “Clear cache.”
If videos still aren’t showing up after that…it’s time to play the waiting game. And yes, the waiting game sucks. You may want to find something else to amuse yourself while TikTok’s techs attmpt to patch the glitch.
