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TikTok has gone dark in the United States, the result of a federal law banning the popular short-form video app for millions of Americans — at least for now.
TikTok users started receiving a message about the ban around 10:30 pm Eastern. As of Saturday evening, the app was also no longer available in Apple’s App Store.
“Sorry, TikTok is not available right now,” the message says. “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, this means you can’t use TikTok for now.”
However, the message also suggests that this may only be a temporary disappearance, crediting President-elect Donald Trump for indicating “he will work with us on a solution to restore TikTok once he takes office,” with the users invited to “stay tuned!”
The company had indicated that the disappearance of the app was imminent, saying on friday that “it would be dark” unless President Joe Biden’s administration made a “definitive statement” that it would not enforce the ban.
Biden signed the law in April, which requires TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or see it banned in the United States, due to concerns about potential Chinese surveillance and propaganda. And while efforts to force ByteDance to divest date back to the early Trump administration, it has taken a very different tone recently, asking the Supreme Court to delay the ban and saying that he would “probably” give the company a 90-day extension.
And while the Supreme Court has published a decision keep the law on fridaythe Biden administration seemed inclined leaving the fate of the app in the hands of the next presidentwith White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying that Sunday is Biden’s last day in office, “actions to implement the law should simply fall to the next administration” and the deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco issued a similar statement that “the next phase of this effort – implementing and ensuring compliance with the law after it goes into effect on January 19 – will be a process that takes place with the time”.
TikTok, however, suggested that this was not enough to ensure that “critical service providers” would continue to list or host the app in the United States, unless the Biden administration made the aforementioned “definitive statement” . Jean-Pierre called TikTok’s response “a stunt” and said that “there is no reason for TikTok or other companies to take action in the next few days before the Trump administration takes office on Monday.”
Stunt or not, TikTok is gone for now.
