What does ud83d mean on TikTok? Strange glitch baffles users

Hand holding phone next to screenshot of TikTok glitchUnsplash: Olivier Bergeron / TikTok: lebreezy1217

TikTok users have been baffled by unusual terms similar to ‘ud83d’ appearing in the captions of videos on their For You Page, but the strange phenomenon appears to be the result of a glitch.

With millions of users across the globe and new trends appearing on a daily basis, TikTok is the hub of viral content on the internet, and many can even spend hours every day scrolling through their For You Page and watching the wealth of content on the app.

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But with the app growing so big there are often occasions where things don’t work as they should, leading to glitches or technical issues that confuse users when encountered.

The latest example is TikTok videos with ‘ud83d’ appearing in the captions, for no obvious reason.

https://twitter.com/hs1oml/status/1496931949885153284

Initially, some thought that it may have been a new trend or slang term (of which TikTok has many) but people quickly realized that it must have been some sort of glitch.

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After users flooded social media with their concerns, it appears that the strings of letters and numbers are actually emoji unicode.

This means that people are putting emojis into the description for their uploads, and they are inexplicably displaying simply as code.

TikTok caption showing code glitchTikTok: lebreezy1217
The glitch has been appearing across hundreds of videos.

So far, it’s not clear what exactly has caused the glitch, and TikTok hasn’t addressed the issue at the time of writing so it’s not clear if there’s any way for users to fix the issue themselves.

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You can try making sure your app and device are both up to date with the latest versions, but if the issue lies with TikTok itself, it might just be a case of waiting for them to get to the bottom of the problem.