TikTok is going through its biggest crisis ever.

India ban, Australian investigation, Trump threats, imminent sale to Microsoft… TikTok is on pins and toes with the barrage of bad news.

TikTok, which just two months ago was riding high as a poster child for a Chinese Internet company going overseas, now faces an awkward future that could only get worse.

This micro-story is dictated by two TikTok employees:

One of them had just left and heard some stories about being shut down; The other was hanging on, witnessing how nationalist sentiment ran high inside the company on the night of the rumored acquisition…

Here are the real stories about them:

Nationalism was in the air the night **** was rumored to be acquired

Muzi, 24, product manager of Bytedance’s international division

By the morning yiming sent the open letter, my circle of friends had recovered calm.

When our staff forwarded the open letter, it was just an official announcement of the “grand finale” of a hot event, and almost no one made any private comments on it.

It’s just another Monday morning inside ByteDance.

Bytedance is at the center of the topic vortex, just like the eye of a tornado.

The most hotly debated night came last Saturday night, Aug. 1.

Bytedance was rumored to be selling TikTok, and when the news broke, the company’s internal anonymous sphere exploded, with a flood of posts about it far overshadowing other issues.

The initial fear was obvious, but it wasn’t fear of losing your job.

We are quite confident about our workplace competitiveness. Even if the company goes out of business, it will not affect our survival. The worst result is to change a company.

But after all, the relationship between us and the company is one of prosperity and loss, and even if we are individualistic, we will have a sense of crisis at this time.

Nationalist sentiment reached a visible peak that night, with some agitated employees openly declaring on Wechat that they would rather donate their wages than sell TikTok.

But the sound of feeling, like a storm, blew madly for an hour or two, and then stopped. Rationality soon returned to everyone, and more calm voices joined in one after another.

Some people refuted the six-nation theory by saying “it is inappropriate to use the metaphor of national sovereignty”, others analyzed what ByteDance should say from the perspective of PR, and others debated whether TikTok should be sold to Microsoft or Facebook.

But that discussion died, and now that the TikTok story is high on the agenda, we all know: Does our word count? A single sound is not necessarily decisive, and the amount of variation we can make is minimal.

So we are more to express a point of view, finished, do not think this matter will have too much impact on their own.

As a history major, I usually hate such grand narratives. However, when I was forced to be involved in the storm of two sides playing chess, I realized that international current affairs and my work were so close to each other. It was also the first time that I felt the sense of value of work besides making money.

It turns out that the seemingly mundane tasks we do every day can have such an impact.

Bytedance has been experimenting with something different for a long time.

TikTok US, byteDance’s one business in one country, is just doing a good job, generating a lot of buzz on social media, and being seen as famous, that’s all.

In the future, I believe people will know more about our overseas products, and maybe next year, the most familiar byteDance product will not be TikTok, which I am quite confident.

**** India after the ban, did not expect profits should also go up

Big Fly 29 years old former TikTok programmer

I joined ByteDance as a programmer on TikTok two years ago and left in May to join a startup.

Because of the position in the past, I have heard of some recent internal events.

During my two years on TikTok, I had the opportunity to visit many countries and gain a lot of insight.

In my opinion, as an international company, the most difficult problem TikTok faces is “localization”, after all, every country has different cultural taboos and ideological conflicts.

So TikTok will operate in different countries, and then implement different localization strategies based on local conditions.

In the United States, for example, we don’t show Indian videos. In India, we also don’t allow users to view large scale videos from the US and Europe, because TikTok users in the US and Europe upload many videos with adult content, which is taboo in India.

In unstable countries with complex languages, we try to silence them and avoid touching sensitive topics.

Therefore, we are always afraid of local fines due to the content of the platform.

When TikTok was taken down in India not long ago, the team atmosphere was fantastic. Some employees are “thankful” that so few users in India pay for TikTok, and that India’s jumbled local languages — hundreds or thousands of them — require a lot of vetting, resulting in high human costs.

So TikTok’s removal in India has saved a lot of costs, which in turn has increased TikTok’s overall profits.

Of course, there are plenty of concerns — TikTok has 150 million daily users in India, making it a gold mine for Internet companies that see traffic as their lifeline.

After India, there was more concern about whether other countries would follow suit, given TikTok’s huge workforce in every region.

After being shut down, the employee had only two options: downsizing or transferring. But internal jobs are limited, so a lot of people may still be laid off.

After the ** “Microsoft acquisition of TikTok US” ** was confirmed, it felt like a nightmare come true.

Although people on the Internet are scolding Zhang Yiming for selling TikTok for $50 billion to the US and saying that capital is heartless, our internal staff have mixed feelings.

From our internal point of view, the $50 billion deal was a hard grab and a “you can’t say no” kind of deal.

If byteDance refuses, all of its U.S. operations could be affected or even shut down, leaving it with no money. Bytedance has tens of thousands of employees in several U.S. offices, and what will happen to those employees?

TikTok’s ban actually showed some signs early on.

In March, TikTok began placing more of its overseas content moderation jobs in other countries.

So some time ago, when everything was not a foregone conclusion, the whole byte thought a lot of ways to save. But the truth is, everything has been tried, everything has been tried, and nothing has changed.

This is the first time in years that byteDance has had an accident without other competitors kicking it down the throes.

After all, in today’s globalized world, many companies are going overseas.