I’m in the US, so obviously the TikTok ban just went into effect here. I’ve made my peace with the ban, but I did expect that I’d be able to access TikTok through a VPN - I’m more just curious about the technical reasons this isn’t working.
What I’m doing: from the US, I’m using NordVPN to route through the Netherlands. When I go to an IP finder website, it locates me in the Netherlands, so that part is working. When I tried to open TikTok in a normal browser window it wasn’t working, but I assumed that it might be because it looked at my cookies and could tell that I was a US-based account, even if the request was coming from outside the US. So I tried again in an incognito browser window, but I got the same 403 error.
I’m surprised this is even possible. TikTok isn’t banned in the Netherlands, and I don’t know how TikTok could possibly tell the incognito request isn’t coming from the Netherlands. It’s not like I’ve authorized location permissions for it, so my IP should be the only information it has about my location, right?
I have had issues before where streaming content that was supposed to be available in the Netherlands wasn’t available for me using NordVPN. Is NordVPN just bad, and websites denylist its IP ranges, or what?
EDIT: I tried a handful of other countries and none of them work, just to rule out Netherlands-specific issues.
Likely because the ban is not USA IP’s specific.
The ban is on USA created accounts or accounts registered with USA.
So I assume if you created a new account not registered to USA then it would work.
Same. I’m going to the site on a browser that has never logged into Tiktok before, I get the error message. It doesn’t have anything to do with my TT account.
I’m not even in the US and as a NordVPN customer I can’t use it to access TikTok either. Didn’t create the account in the US either. Like I can’t access it even not logged in, with a VPN connection to my own country.
I’m assuming TikTok is just banning the IP’s ANY US flagged account has EVER logged into. Which is going to quickly exhaust all public VPN IPs.
I am in the UK, account created in the UK, and the app doesn’t function properly on Nord. I get “No internet connection”. However I can see notifications in the app.
If your amount was created in the US, your email and phone number are linked to US servers and those accounts are banned from accessing TikTok.
If you are able to access TikTok, your US account will not work, you will need to create a new account from a non-American country that’s allowed to access the site.
When using a VPN, you are better off using a Double-VPN… AND make sure that your device location is spoofed to anywhere outside of the US territories, matching your VPN would be better.
I’m in the U.K., but my Mac is set to the U.S. so I can take advantage of Apple Intelligence. I can’t access TilTok now so I assume it is because of this.
Maybe I should have been clearer - I simply tried to navigate to the site in an incognito browser window and immediately got a 403. Did not attempt to log in or anything yet.
As It noted above: I’m getting a 403 immediately upon navigating to the site in an incognito window. I’m not logged into my account, or attempting to log into my account, when doing so yet the site is still inaccessible.
It may be a combination of DNS server and also VPN, or just DNS server that needs changed. though i haven’t tried it yet. I’d imagine it wouldn’t be hard to get access to website but app on phone is a whole other story. Though if they are also blocking us phone numbers you may not even be able to sign up without a phone # from UK or something