TikTok Downloader Not Working? What Broke in September 2026 and What Still Works

If your usual TikTok downloader started failing in September, the problem is probably not your phone or your link. TikTok changed something at the start of the month, and a lot of tools broke at once.

What broke, and when #

• 1 September 2026. yt-dlp is the free, open-source extractor that many downloader apps and websites use under the hood. Its TikTok support began failing with "Unexpected response from webpage request". The bug report is titled "worked Aug 31, broken Sep 1", and on 28 September it was still open.
• 12–13 September. Reddit users reported that TikWM's original-quality download and JDownloader's TikTok support had stopped working.
• 25 September. On r/TikTok, a user wrote: "R-Download doesn't work anymore, and snaptik.app doesn't work anymore."

When a shared building block breaks, every tool built on it fails in the same week, which is why it can feel as if all of them died together.

What still works #

Not every tool fetches TikTok the same way. We send TikTok links to a different open-source extractor first and keep yt-dlp only as a fallback. That is why TikTok kept working for us while the yt-dlp route was down: from 1 to 27 September, 442 of 459 TikTok video links sent to us came back as files, and of the 184 TikTok jobs from US visitors between 13 and 27 September, 12 failed.

We checked again on 28 September 2026:

This can change on any day: TikTok changes its pages without notice, and every tool, ours included, has to follow. If this page is out of date when you read it, the quickest test is still to paste a link and see.

Paste a link into TikTok to MP4. To save only a part of a video, use the TikTok clip downloader.

Why one TikTok can still fail on a working tool #

Even with a working downloader, some links cannot be saved:

• Private or friends-only videos. Only people the owner allows can see them.
• Deleted videos. The link still exists, but there is nothing behind it.
• Region-locked videos. Some videos only play in some countries.
• Sound pages. A tiktok.com/music/… link is the page of a sound: a list of the videos that use it. There is no single file behind it. Open one of those videos and convert that link instead.
• Live streams. A live broadcast is not a finished file until it ends.

A quick check: open the link in a private browser window without logging in. If the video does not play there, no downloader can reach it either.

Wrapping up #

If a TikTok downloader stopped working in September 2026, it was most likely TikTok's 1 September change. It was not your link. Try a tool that fetches TikTok another way, and if a single video still fails, check whether it is public.

Try it free: TikTok to MP4 → · Also see: how to download TikTok videos without a watermark