TikTok Rumours Spark Buzz; Government Rejects Social Media Reports

Speculation about TikTok’s return to India surged this week after users reported partial access to the video-sharing platform’s website. For the first time in five years, pages like “About Us” and “Contact” appeared to open without the usual blocks, fuelling talk of a quiet revival. But government officials have moved swiftly to quash the buzz, stressing there has been no policy change.

“The Government of India has not issued any unblocking order for TikTok. Any such statement or news is false and misleading,” an official statement clarified by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The app itself remains unavailable on both Google Play and the Apple App Store in India. Core features such as logging in, viewing videos, or uploading content remain firmly inaccessible. Industry observers suggest the sudden website visibility is likely a technical anomaly rather than an administrative shift.

TikTok, owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, was banned in June 2020 along with 58 other apps over national security and data privacy concerns. Before the ban, India was TikTok’s largest overseas market with more than 200 million users, making the platform’s disappearance a major disruption in the social media landscape. The brief flicker of accessibility, however, has sparked political debate. The Congress party accused the government of “softening toward China” and compared the situation to past ceasefire arrangements, while others reiterated the importance of keeping Chinese apps out of Indian cyberspace.

Despite the chatter, officials insist nothing has changed: the ban stays in place. For now, TikTok remains absent from India’s booming short-video ecosystem, which has since seen the rise of homegrown platforms such as Josh, Moj, and Chingari.