The TikTok app and website effectively shut down in the United States late Saturday, just before a nationwide ban on the video-sharing platform took effect. The company showed millions of its American users a pop-up message thanking President-elect Donald Trump for stating that he would work with the company to resolve the issue when he takes office on Monday.
Mentions of Trump in official TikTok user notifications appeared amid his vague promises to "save" the app. Trump will be inaugurated on Monday, giving TikTok a very powerful ally in its fight for survival in the US. However, Trump has little chance of saving the app until he takes office, and even after he comes to power, questions remain about how he plans to resolve this dispute, writes The Washington Post.
On Saturday evening, users across the country suddenly could not scroll through the app or website, access their profile, or view saved favorites. The pop-up window referred to another page on the TikTok website, stating that users could still download their data and included a link.
Soon after, Apple and Google removed it from their app stores—the only way for most Americans to download TikTok if they didn't already have it on their phone. The app itself remained on people's devices, but it couldn't be used as only the last viewed video was displayed in the background. Ten other ByteDance apps were also removed from app stores, including Lemon8 and the video editing app CapCut.
Last year, President Joe Biden signed a law passed by Congress with bipartisan support to force TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company ByteDance, citing concerns that Beijing could use the app for spying or influencing American users. TikTok and a group of creators challenged the "ban or sell" measure in court, arguing that it violated their free speech rights under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. However, on Friday, the Supreme Court rejected these arguments.
On Saturday, Trump told NBC News that he "most likely" would give TikTok a 90-day reprieve to try to find a buyer. However, it is unclear whether the extension could immediately lift the ban and whether Trump could extend the ban after the company's allotted time for sale expires.
According to a WP source, the artificial intelligence search company Perplexity approached the owners of TikTok—ByteDance—with a proposal to merge the two companies so that TikTok could continue to operate in the US.
As RusNews writes, after the block in the US, TikTok also stopped working for Russian users with VPN on American servers. Russians using special mods to access TikTok also faced issues—servers of such services are often located in the US. The owners of mod apps are planning to fix the problem.
Photo: Reuters