This data answers the question you have about TikTok's U.S. traffic following January 19th
TikTok fans surely remember what happened to the popular short-form video app on Saturday, January 18th. As a law banning TikTok in the U.S. the next day was about to take effect, the site's owner, Chinese company ByteDance posted a notice reminding users that the service would have to be temporarily banned starting Sunday the 19th. At the same time, TikTok assured its American fans that it is working to restore its service in the U.S. and to stay tuned.
The next day, those opening the TikTok app hoping that a last-second prayer had been answered were greeted by another note. This one said that the law in the U.S. banning TikTok now prevented users from viewing the app. It also praised President Trump who, according to the message, indicated to TikTok that he would work on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he was inaugurated as president for the second time.
Once sworn in, Trump signed an executive order giving TikTok 75 additional days to find a U.S. buyer or get banned. The executive order now gives TikTok until April 5th to meet the conditions of the bill signed by then-President Biden last April. Google and Apple have removed TikTok from their Android and iOS app storefronts respectively and plan to keep them off until a deal is reached to sell TikTok to a U.S. firm.
DNS traffic to U.S. TikTok alternatives show a peak on January 19th. | Image credit-Cloudflare/CNBC
According to a report from Cloudflare Radar, a firm that tracks internet traffic, the number of visitors to TikTok has nearly recovered to the level that it had prior to suffering an 85% decline after the app shutdown temporarily last month. David Belson, head of data insight at Cloudflare, told CNBC in a statement that its tracking of DNS traffic for TikTok related domain names has been moving higher since service to the app has been restored and is now just 10% lower than the level it was at before experiencing the 14 hours of disrupted service it dealt with over two weeks ago.
DNS, or Domain Name System, takes the name of a website you're looking to visit and changes it to the IP address used by the browser to visit that site. Cloudflare Radar handles large amounts of DNS queries which gives it a unique look at internet trends in traffic patterns including the ability to see the most popular domain names and thus the most popular online destinations.
Traffic for TikTok alternatives started to pick up a week before the January 19th starting date of the ban led by a popular alternative called RedNote (aka Xiaohongshu in China). But traffic to these sites hit their high on the day the TikTok ban started and DNS traffic to these sites dropped quickly once the shutdown ended and has continued to drop since.
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