TikTok now has 1 billion monthly users

Nearly five years after Twitter shut down Vine, TikTok has reached the coveted 1 billion monthly active user mark. The company announced the milestone in a blog post on Monday. Attracting 1 billion users to any platform is a significant feat. However, TikTok’s rise in popularity is especially impressive when you consider almost exactly a year ago the Trump Administration was threatening to ban the app if ByteDance, TikTok’s Bejing-based parent company, didn’t sell it to an American buyer.

Then you have the speed at which TikTok achieved the feat. The app has only been widely available since 2018 — though you could download it in select markets as early as 2017. It took Instagram nearly eight years after its initial release and almost six years after it was acquired by Facebook in 2012 before it passed the 1 billion user threshold. Granted, the internet was a smaller place then with fewer people connected to it through their phones, but none of that takes away from TikTok’s ascent.