Collateral damage in the TikTok clusterfuck was hit by the mobile deck builder, Marvel Snap. It's still going strong as it was all we could think about at the end of 2022, the Marvel licensed game developed by Ben.Hearthstone“Brode and his team at Second Dinner have been offline in the United States since TikTok went down on Saturday evening.
This situation probably arose because Marvel Snap is ultimately owned by the same Chinese company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, which is the target of the outgoing Democrats' botched ban in their self-destructive desperation to hand Trump a first-day victory for his second attempt as president. However, developer Second Dinner has said that it is doing its best to make this happen Marvel Snap back online, and they hope to do so sometime this Martin Luther King Day.
Late Sunday evening, the company released a statement on X acknowledging the situation and its intention to “bring it back online within 24 hours.”
Exactly why Marvel Snap was removed at the same time as the TikTok ban went into effect is unclear and was certainly not expected by Second Dinner. When the game in the US suddenly turned dark on January 19th, The developer posted“Unfortunately, MARVEL SNAP is temporarily unavailable in US app stores and cannot be played in the US. This outage comes as a surprise to us and was not planned.”
At the same time, Second Dinner told affected players that it was aware that the downtime was failing with a range of “time-based content, rewards and missions”, but promised everyone would be “compensated for their lost time”.
But even though TikTok is already online again, Marvel Snap is still unavailable as of Monday morning. Trump immediately declared his plan to intervene as soon as the ban went into effect (a ban that he himself announced in 2020, of course), which gave TikTok the confidence to come back online. However, it appears to be ByteDance Marvel Snap got 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 Snap as long as they are there?
Marvel Snap is not the only one involved in all this. Other ByteDance apps like CapCut and Lark are also down, as the Chinese company presumably simply suppressed everything at once to avoid violating the ban. However, Snap is still available and works as usual in the rest of the world.
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