TikTok will be blocked in Albania from 13 March onwards, according to official letters sent to telecommunications operators by national regulators and seen by Euractiv.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama confirmed the shut-down on 6 March, which he had first announced at the end of December. The announcement followed a fight in a Tirana school which led to the killing of a 14-year old and another who suffered injuries.
Albania is the first European country to issue a nationwide ban on TikTok, and the second from the Western world, since the blitz US ban in January.
“We request your support in taking the necessary measures to block access to the TikTok application and its digital infrastructure within the Albanian territory,” read letters from the regulatory authorities for telecoms and cybersecurity, outlining the operators’ obligations to enforce the ban.
Telecommunications operators must block TikTok’s unique internet addresses (IPs) and ensure that its system for translating IP addresses into domain names (DNS) is inaccessible, along with its identification protocols (SNI), from March 13, read a letter sent by Albanian telecommunications regulator AKEP dated 11 March.
The IPs of TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, also need to be blocked, the letter states.
Albania’s cyber regulator AKSK provided a list of 200+ web domains to be blocked by telecommunication operators in order to prevent users from circumventing the ban.
That list includes expected routes of entry such as tiktok.com, but also unconventional sites like pull-flvl-f6-hs.pstatp.com or quic-tiktok-proxy-i18n-gcpva.byteoversea.net.
Telecommunications operators have been ordered to confirm in writing that they have complied with the regulators’ instructions.
It is expected that Albanians wishing to continue accessing TikTok will download virtual private networks (VPNs) to bypass restrictions. Albanians may also flock to Chinese video-sharing app Xiaohongshu, nicknamed RedNote, just as Americans did during the short TikTok ban in the US.
A handful of countries, including Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Somalia have banned TikTok. In China, it is replaced by Douyin, another ByteDance video-sharing app.
France blocked TikTok in its territory of New Caledonia for two weeks in May 2024, in an attempt to curb riots during the island’s state of emergency.
The European Commission and several EU countries have banned TikTok on corporate devices since 2023, citing data protection concerns.
