The "I don't want to play with you anymore" scene from the
Toy Story 2 movie has served as a precursor for one of the most viral memes out there, and I'm sure you've seen it thousands of times. That's the meme template one could use for describing the current TikTok situation, now that the viral short video app has the "Made in USA" label after the
deal we told you about some days ago.
Enter UpScrolled
The latest
reports have it that tens of thousands joined an app called UpScrolled in a matter of just several days last week.UpScrolled can be used by both iOS and Android users and is in the top 15 list of most sought-after apps in Apple's App Store. In fact, the traffic now is so great compared to what it used to be a week ago that the company says their servers "tapped out" because people "showed up so fast". The social media platform has been reportedly downloaded over 40,000 times in the Thursday-Sunday period. Before the TikTok takeover deal was signed, UpScrolled had to contend with just 460 daily downloads.
The UpScrolled app launched last year and it was founded by Issam Hijazi, a Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist, with a focus on open expression and equal visibility for posts. The platform positions itself as politically neutral, claims it does not shadowban users or content, and says it balances free speech with social responsibility. Its design combines elements of Instagram and X, supporting photo, video, and text posts alongside private messaging between users.
The TikTok outages
The UpScrolled influx could be partially attributed to claims that TikTok would now impose "censorship", plus, the TikTok app experienced
severe technical problems a few nights ago.
The "new" TikTok "enjoyed" service disruptions over its first weekend with outage reports peaking early Sunday and continuing into Monday. The company said the problems were caused by a power outage at a US data center affecting TikTok and other apps it operates.Later, Oracle (a part-owner of TikTok USDS) confirmed it was the previously unnamed US data center partner hit by the power outage, which disrupted video publishing and temporarily affected TikTok's recommendation system. The company said the outage was weather-related.
