UpScrolled’s user count just exploded from 50,000 to 2.5 million pretty much overnight. The app’s official X account dropped the update early this morning with a post on X, saying, “50k → 2.5m (and counting…).” They admitted their servers are getting hammered and they’re rushing to scale up.
A lot of that traffic came straight from TikTok’s massive outage that impacted the platform for over a week. TikTok put out a statement saying a bad winter storm took out power at a key Oracle data center in the US that triggered network and storage problems across tens of thousands of servers, killing real-time likes, views, and the whole discovery feed for days.
The company finally confirmed full restoration earlier today with a post on X:
Adding to the platform’s troubles, this whole mess hit right after TikTok wrapped up its big US ownership shakeup. To dodge a full ban, ByteDance spun off American operations into a joint venture mostly controlled by US investors like Oracle, Silver Lake, and others.
The deal closed late January, shifting user data handling and sparking fresh privacy fears among creators and everyday scrollers due to the new terms update, which we highlighted in depth.
So if you hadn’t guessed already, both these situations played in favor of UpScrolled. Users who simply wanted a functional app and those who wanted to get away from the privacy issues on TikTok saw UpScrolled as a favorable alternative at the same time.
The app markets itself hard as a no-censorship zone – short videos, photos, text posts, stories, all without heavy algo tweaks or shadowbans. But still, it’s no match for TikTok’s actual user base, which, at the time of this writing, is reportedly around 1.6 billion users around the world.
That said, UpScrolled isn’t the only “alternative” platform that is reaping the rewards. Rivals like Skylight piled on too, up 919 percent to 380k users.
These fresh new platforms like UpScrolled still have bugs to iron out, no doubt, with some early reviews calling them rough around the edges. Still, if they deliver on the freedom promise, a lot of those new millions might not come back.
Only time will tell whether this overnight success will result in platforms like UpScrolled becoming serious competition to TikTok, or if all the hype will fade away, much like Mastodon has slowly started to fade into oblivion, after it became one of the most hyped-up Twitter alternatives.
Featured image generated with AI
Dwayne Cubbins
2699 Posts
I cover fast-moving stories across apps, online platforms, and everyday tech — phones, wearables, consoles, and whatever else people are fighting with this week. Bugs, rollouts, scams, policy enforcement, and the occasional internet-culture rabbit hole are all fair game. My goal is simple — make confusing tech news readable. When I'm not working, I'm working out or chilling with my dog. Got a tip? You can find me on X @dcubbins.
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