TikTok back online after half a day in United States, Congress threatens

After being offline for almost half a day in the US, TikTok is now available again. Now anyone who opens the video application will be greeted with “Welcome back!” It will be done by saying. It was welcomed and announced that the next US President Donald Trump would be responsible for the withdrawal. This is reported by The Verge and also shows a screenshot of the new message. Hours earlier, Trump had announced that he wanted to ensure that TikTok operator ByteDance gets a bailout soon after taking office. However, the goal is still to sell the application. Although ByteDance has always denied this sale, the company has reportedly decided that enough is enough.

Advertisement

TikTok back online after half a day in United States, Congress threatens

Trust in ByteDance, doubt in Apple and Google

Trump had also assured the companies that they would not be held accountable if they supported TikTok contrary to prohibition law. According to The Verge This assurance was enough for TikTok’s hosting provider Oracle and CDN provider Akamai to make their services available to TikTok again. Things look different at Google and Apple. TikTok is not available in US corporate app stores. It says that the app cannot be offered at the moment or its download is “paused”. So ByteDance is confident and has assured advertising customers that the campaign will be restarted soon.

Donald Trump has also said that his auspices would seek “a deal to protect national security” in which ByteDance could retain 50 percent of the shares. The objective is a joint venture in which the United States will get the other half. This could save TikTok and make it even more valuable. The Verge also reports that TikTok recently openly relied on Trump to avoid the ban. ByteDance had previously failed before the Supreme Court and therefore exhausted legal remedies against the threatened interception. From a purely legal perspective, nothing changed between the app being blocked on Sunday night and its opening on Sunday afternoon.

threat from senate

Currently, companies that still support TikTok are receiving sharp threats from the US Senate. Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts, two senators from Donald Trump’s Republican Party. ExplainedThat there is no legal basis for any extension of the sale period of TikTok. ByteDance would have to agree to the sale to avoid sanctions. Any company supporting TikTok could face fines of “hundreds of billions of dollars.” Cotton later issued a threat over the short message service X. And warned: “Think about it.”

ByteDance itself blocked TikTok for users in the United States on Sunday night, before the ban law took effect. It required the Chinese company to sell the US branch of the popular application and set a deadline to do so, which expired on Sunday. The law gives the outgoing US President the authority to grant a waiver, but only if the sale actually takes place. ByteDance has always denied this. Although Joe Biden had assured before the weekend that he would not enforce the ban, the app then went offline, and came back up after Donald Trump promised the same content.

(mho)