Tik Tok Disruptions: Is Nigeria’s North Experiencing Some Sort of Censorship?

TikTok users across several parts of Nigeria’s northern region have been struggling to access the platform, and many have turned to VPNs to get around the problem, according to multiple X posts about the subject. Comments from users in Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, and other areas in the region show that the app either won’t load at all or becomes nearly unusable when connected through standard mobile data.

People have described their feeds freezing partway through scrolling, videos that would not play, and uploads that kept stalling out. Interestingly, many said the issue cleared up almost instantly once they turned on a VPN.

Because the complaints have been so consistent across different cities, it has raised questions around technical or routing issues on the network side, or some kind of intentional restriction that has not been announced.

Two residents of Kaduna state, who asked to be anonymous, explained to Culture Custodian that they had been shut out of normal TikTok access since Monday and only got back in after switching on a VPN. One of them even tried using the app while connected to his WIFI router, but it was to no avail.

Some users also said they had trouble getting to TikTok through its mobile website, not just the app, suggesting the disruption might not be restricted to the app alone. The problems reportedly started suddenly on Monday and have dragged on for several days since, though how bad it is seems to depend on the user’s location and connection.

At this time, there is no public statement from Nigerian regulators or telecom providers acknowledging that TikTok access had been restricted in these areas. There is also no official word on whether the cause is a technical fault, a network configuration issue, some form of traffic management, or a deliberate block.

This lack of an explanation has left room for speculation, especially since VPNs seem to fix the problem for a lot of affected users. From a technical standpoint, a VPN working suggests that rerouting your traffic gets around whatever is interfering with the normal connection, but that alone does not prove that any authority or telecom company deliberately blocked the app.

It is also worth noting that the disruption does not seem to be hitting every TikTok user in Nigeria equally. The complaints are concentrated in specific areas of Northern Nigeria. Based on what is known so far, this does not look like a nationwide shutdown of TikTok, nor is there ample  evidence of TikTok itself having a broader service failure.

With elections drawing near, many are convinced that this is a deliberate government effort to censor the north and restrict access to non-mainstream media.