By Echo Wang
NEW YORK (Reuters) – TikTok hit 1 billion monthly active users globally this summer, the company told Reuters, marking a 45% jump since July 2020.
The United States, Europe, Brazil and Southeast Asia are the biggest markets for the popular short-video app, the company said.
TikTok has experienced surges in users around the world in the past few years, despite regulatory scrutiny it is facing in the United States and other regions.
The company previously said it had about 55 million global users by January 2018. That number rose to more than 271 million by December 2018, 508 million by December 2019, and 689 million by July 2020.
Facebook reported 2.9 billion monthly active users as of end of June 2021, according to its latest quarterly report.
TikTok previously said it surpassed 2 billion global downloads by August 2020.
The video sharing platform is owned by China technology giant ByteDance. TikTok appointed ByteDance’s CFO Shouzi Chew, a Singaporean national, as the new chief executive officer of the company earlier this year.
(This story corrects to change July 2021 to July 2020 in paragraph four)
(Reporting by Echo Wang in New York; Editing by Kenneth Li and Daniel Wallis)
