The August 2026 TikTok outage: what broke and how we fixed it

Updated October 7, 2026

From August 10, 2026, every TikTok download in Top Video Downloader failed with "The download failed for an unknown reason": TikTok's bot protection started serving a block page to the download engine. Version 0.1.4 fixed it on August 17 by sending an ordinary Referer header, and 0.1.5 later shipped the official yt-dlp fix as well.

What did users see?

You pasted a TikTok link and a few seconds later got "The download failed for an unknown reason". Not on a few odd videos, but on every TikTok link, ordinary public videos included. YouTube, VK and the other sites kept working. The message was part of the problem: it gave no hint that the site was at fault rather than your computer or your connection.

Why did TikTok downloads stop working?

Before downloading, yt-dlp opens the video page and reads the stream data from it. On August 10, TikTok's web application firewall (Akamai) started answering that request with a 537-byte "Site Maintenance" page instead of the video page. Our bundled yt-dlp ships with curl_cffi, a library that makes the request look like it comes from a browser, and the TikTok extractor always uses it. That exact request was what got blocked. Without the real page, yt-dlp cannot find the video and stops with "Unexpected response from webpage request".

It was not just us. The problem is tracked upstream as yt-dlp issue #17403, and the official fix came in pull request #17437.

Timeline of the outage

How the 0.1.4 workaround worked

The block targeted a request that looked like an automated browser landing on a TikTok page out of nowhere. A real person usually reaches a video by clicking around TikTok, and the browser then says where the click came from in a Referer header. Version 0.1.4 adds that header to every tiktok.com and tiktokv.com link:

--referer https://www.tiktok.com/

The header goes out both when the app checks formats and when it downloads, so the two steps never disagree about how they fetch the site. With it, TikTok served the normal page again. The official PR #17437 does the same thing inside the TikTok extractor, but our fix reached users first. We keep workarounds like this in one short list of per-site fixes, each tied to an upstream issue: a temporary patch until the official release catches up.

Why the header stayed after the official fix

In 0.1.5 we bundled yt-dlp 2026.08.19, which includes the fix, and checked that TikTok downloads without our header on that version. We kept the header anyway. Browsers send a Referer regardless, so it only makes the request look more natural, and it keeps the per-site fix mechanism in use and under test. If TikTok changes something again, the daily check will show it.

What we changed after the outage

For a full week, TikTok did not work for our users. The fix itself was one line, but back then any change to the engine could only reach you inside a new version of the app. 2.0 works differently:

• Separate yt-dlp updates. The app looks for a new yt-dlp 20 seconds after launch and then every 6 hours, with no reinstall. Every update is signed with Ed25519 over its SHA-256; if the signature does not match, the current version stays. Our pipeline watches upstream yt-dlp stable releases daily.
• A daily check of 63 platforms. Every night our server downloads one real video from each platform, TikTok included, with the same engine the app uses. The results are on the status page, with an error class for each failure and 14 days of history.
• Errors that make sense. Since 0.1.4, an unexpected response from a site is labelled "Site changed" with the message "Couldn't read this page. The site may have changed…" instead of "unknown reason".
• A log for support. Since 0.1.6, Settings → Diagnostics copies a short log, with links removed, that you can send us.

What to do if TikTok stops downloading again

1. 1

   Open the status page. If TikTok is listed as failing, the problem is on the site's side and the fix will arrive as an update.

2. 2

   Make sure you run the latest version. The app checks for updates on launch, and 2.0 downloads them in the background, so you only need to click Restart & install.

3. 3

   Try another public video. Private videos and videos from private accounts need your own TikTok login in Platform logins.

4. 4

   Still failing? Copy the log from Settings → Diagnostics and send it to us on Telegram; the links are on the contact page.

For everyday TikTok downloads, supported link types and the watermark question, see the TikTok guide. Every release in order is in the changelog.