Users of the short video making platform TikTok are not being able to use it from several parts of the country even though, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission- BTRC, did not give any instructions to stop it. According to the sources, they could not enter TikTok even after repeated attempts from some places around three o’clock on Sunday afternoon.
Victims reported that content images and users’ profile images were not being displayed; so, are unable to upload video since noon. The problem appeared even critical after the evening.
Ahmed Junayed, Secretary General of IIG Forum, told DigiBangla, “We are getting many complaints about TikTok. We also found that TikTok is not being used. There is almost zero traffic of TikTok. However, I have not yet received any directive from any regulatory body to stop TikTok.”
Even though the situation is the same in all parts of the country, they do not have any statistics on the number of TikTokers in Bangladesh, he said, like Google and Facebook, TikTok does not have its own CDN in the country. They are hosted in the cloud. As a result, it is not possible to give any information about this.
When asked about this, Suman Ahmed Sabir, Chief Technology Officer of IIG Company Fiber@ Home, told DigiBangla that after 3 pm, they are seeing a lot less TikTok traffic. He said that TikTok had a bandwidth of over 50 GB per second, but it was completely zero after the afternoon.
In response to the question of how much bandwidth is used in TikTok in a day, he said that only a quarter or a fifth of the total bandwidth used is used in TikTok.
Meanwhile, Posts and Telecommunications Minister Mostafa Jabbar has confirmed that no instructions will be given regarding the banning of TikTok. He commented, “We didn’t stop.”