Marvel Snap is caught in TikTok Ban Crossfire, and still down

Collateral damage in the TikTok clusterfuck was hit by the mobile deck builder, Marvel Snap. Still going strong since it was all we could think about at the end of 2022, the Marvel licensed game created by Ben”Hearth“Brode and his Second Dinner team have been offline in the US since TikTok went down on Saturday evening.

This situation is probably due to the fact that Marvel Snap is ultimately owned by the same Chinese company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, which is the target of the incumbent Democrats’ failed ban, in their self-destructive desperation to give Trump a day one victory for his second attempt at playing a president on TV. However, developer Second Dinner has made it known that it is doing everything possible to obtain Marvel Snap back online, and they hope it will be at some point on Martin Luther King Day.

Late Sunday evening, the company released a statement on X acknowledging the situation and its intention to “get it back online within 24 hours.”

Exactly why Marvel Snap was removed at the same time as the TikTok ban went into effect, it’s unclear, and it certainly wasn’t intended by Second Dinner. On January 19, when the match suddenly went dark in the United States, the developer posted“Unfortunately, MARVEL SNAP is temporarily unavailable in the US app stores and is not available to play in the US. This outage comes as a surprise to us and was not expected.”

At the same time, Second Dinner let affected players know that it was aware that downtime came with a bunch of “time-based content, rewards, and missions,” but that it promised to all that they would be “compensated for their wasted time”.

However, even though TikTok is already back online, Marvel Snap is still down Monday morning. Trump immediately declared his intention to intervene as soon as the ban was enacted (a ban that he of course announced himself in 2020), which gave TikTok the confidence to come back online. However, it appears that ByteDance Marvel Snap was caught in the crossfire. TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew is attending Trump’s inauguration, so maybe someone could ask him to turn the switch back on to Instant while they are there?

Marvel Snap isn’t the only one caught up in all this. Other ByteDance apps like CapCut and Lark are also down, as the Chinese company likely added everything at once to avoid violating the ban. However, Instant is still available and working normally in the rest of the world.

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