Users Waited Until the Day the App Went Dark to Download Tik Toks

“Tik Tok download,” peaked as the most popular Google search in the US at 2 p.m. Saturday, January 18, according to Google Trends. Eight hours later, at around 10:30, Tik Tok started going dark.

Instead of Bad Bunny or DJ GallixC partying in our phones (but never phoning in the party), US users saw the message, “Sorry, Tik Tok isn’t available right now.” A law had required the app to either split from its China-based owner, ByteDance, or go offline.

Tik Tok was back with a possible 75-day extension 14 hours later but, as far as we knew, our go-to vids were going away for good.

“I didn’t even get a pop-up,” wrote user aarws22 in the r/TikTok subreddit. “I noticed profile pics disappearing, then comments not working, then it just wouldn’t scroll anymore. I reached the end of TikTok.”

The top Google search result for “Tik Tok download,” Saturday was the USA Today article, “TikTok ban: A step-by-step guide to downloading your data.” Another top hit was “How to download all your saved collections,” with 143.3k likes, from laurdiy.

Presumably, the last-mintue Googlers were regular users, not the seven million creators and businesses on the app migrating to Instagram or YouTube. President Biden had signed the law in April 2024 to ban Tik Tok unless the company was sold, followed by tentative delays.

Redditor aarws downloaded content January 18 to a hard drive, mainly Eras tour footage/sounds, their own posts, and more than 1700+ saved favorites.

“I waited because I wanted to see if it was really going to happen,” they said. “The idea of figuring it out overwhelmed me, and I am a procrastinator by nature.”

A fellow Redditor on a post entitled “doomsday,” explained how to download videos from the links Tik Tok provides on request for data. The simple link extraction requires a text file, regex (a sequence of characters that specify a search pattern in text), and a path to a folder via the command prompt.

Who else was searching for, and sharing how to save Tik Toks Saturday?

The 72 out of 100 score for McAllen, Texas, is a relative scale Google developed to show which areas search particular terms the most. The three locations with the highest scores for “Tik Tok download” Saturday where Alpena, Mich. (100), on Lake Huron; Amarillo, Texas (97), halfway between Albuquerque and Oklahoma City; and Green Bay-Appleton, Wis. (96).

Otherwise, of the one-third of US adults on the app, 75% watch content created by the remaining 25%, according to the Pew Research Center. Would they would have downloaded sooner if they had been the creators? And of the 63% of teenagers, ages 13–17, on Tik Tok, 50% were distracted by an essay on Beowulf they put off to the last minute. Not really. But life IRL gets incredibly busy.

Maybe most users waited until Saturday because they doubted a ban would happen. The majority from a September 2024 Pew Research Center study did, but 30% didn’t.

Or maybe it was just the incomprehensibility of a creative community, friends and favorites, disappearing, literally, overnight. Will 170 million US digital personas disappear with Tik Tok, or will they meet back on Tumblr?

Another Redditor, krys, fears losing access to information and ideas.

“What I really wanted to save was the connections that I made on that app,” krys said. “Whether that was bigger creators that I follow that helped me reach certain parts of my identity, or mutuals that I hardly ever spoke to.”

Sara Harvey-Patrick analyzes data, makes front-end wonders, and draws comics in Rochester, New York. Visit her website at saraharveypatrick.com, and check her out on Tumblr, here.