After going dark for millions of Americans this weekend, TikTok came back online following a pledge from Donald Trump to keep it going. There’s just one problem: the law says it should 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 on a law threatening to ban the social media app unless it was sold by its Chinese owner ByteDance.
The divest-or-ban law signed in April last year on national security grounds was upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday, meaning TikTok would officially be offline in the US on January 19 unless it had a new owner. On Saturday, TikTok went dark for American users ahead of the ban.
But following Trump’s pledge over the weekend to delay the law’s effect with an executive order — he asked tech companies to “not let TikTok stay dark” — the companies responsible for making TikTok available in the US appear to have taken diverging paths over 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 face no penalties” by providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans.
Not all service providers seem to have been convinced that’s the case.
Both Apple and Google have opted to comply with the law upheld by the Supreme Court by blocking new downloads of TikTok on their respective app stores; TikTok remained unavailable on their app stores ahead of Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
It means people in the US can use TikTok if they have already installed it, but they cannot download it from Apple or Google’s 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 deal, US TikTok user data is stored on Oracle Cloud.
TikTok, Oracle, Apple, Google, and additional service 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.
Though Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social that “there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark” before his promised executive order, it appears that Apple and Google have chosen to stand by the law that officially bans TikTok.
Not standing by it could come with risk: the law states that US service providers that make TikTok available in the country face a penalty of $5,000 for each person who uses the app. TikTok has over 170 million users in the US so that fine could top $850 billion.
The decision to stick by the law has also drawn praise from some quarters of the Republican Party. In a statement, Senators Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts commended tech companies for following the law.
“The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company that violates it,” they said. “Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date.”
