- TikTok is back online in the US after Donald Trump promised to delay a ban.
- TikTok is working for users who already have the app but unavailable to download from app stores.
- The Supreme Court upheld TikTok’s sell-or-ban law on Friday.
After going dark for millions of Americans this weekend, TikTok returned online after a promise from Donald Trump to keep it going. There’s just one problem: the law says it must still be offline.
TikTok’s status in the US was thrown into confusion ahead of Trump’s inauguration on Monday, after the president-elect promised to extend the deadline for a law that threatens to ban the social media app unless it is sold by its Chinese owner ByteDance.
The sell-or-ban law signed in April last year on national security grounds was upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday, meaning TikTok would be officially offline in the US on January 19 unless it had an owner. new. On Saturday, TikTok went dark for US users ahead of the ban.
But after Trump promised over the weekend to delay the law’s effect with an executive order — he urged tech companies to “not let TikTok stay in the dark” — the companies responsible for making TikTok available in the US appear to have take different paths on the law.
“In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service,” the company said in a statement on Sunday.
TikTok also thanked Trump for his assurance that its service providers — which include Apple, Google, Oracle and cloud provider Akamai — “will not face penalties” for offering TikTok to more than 170 million Americans.
Not all service providers seem to have been convinced that this is the case.
Both Apple and Google have chosen to comply with the Supreme Court-backed law by blocking new TikTok downloads on their respective app stores; TikTok remained unavailable in their app stores ahead of Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
It means people in the US can use TikTok if they already have it installed, but they can’t download it from the Apple or Google app stores.
Meanwhile, The Information reported on Sunday that key partner Oracle was turning its TikTok servers back on to support that process — despite the ban. Under the terms of a 2020 agreement, US TikTok user data is stored in the Oracle Cloud.
TikTok, Oracle, Apple, Google and add-on services provider Akamai Technologies did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
How this saga will unfold once Trump takes office continues to face uncertainty.
Although Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social that “there will be no accountability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark” ahead of his promised executive order, it appears that Apple and Google have chosen to stick to the law which officially bans TikTok.
Not sticking to it can be dangerous: the law says that US service providers who make TikTok available in the country face a $5,000 fine for each person who uses the app. TikTok has over 170 million users in the US, so the fine could reach $850 billion.
The decision to abide by the law has also received praise from some circles of the Republican Party. In a statement, Senators Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts commended the tech companies for following the law.
“The law, after all, risks devastating bankruptcy for any company that violates it,” they said. “Now that the law has gone into effect, there is no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of the effective date.”
