TikTok began going dark for US users late Saturday night, a little more than an hour before a new law banning the app was set to take effect.
Just after 10:30 p.m. ET, users logging in to the app were served with a message reading, “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.” The alert also mentioned President-elect Donald Trump by name saying, “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office.”
On its website, TikTok told users they could still login to download their data.
The app was also unavailable via Apple’s App Store. Videos intermittently loaded on TikTok, but the app also showed a blacked-out screen indicating network issues.
Saturday night’s cutoff for US TikTok users follows a report from The Information which said Oracle (ORCL), which manages TikTok’s US servers, was set to begin shutting down servers that host TikTok’s data as early as 9:00 p.m. ET.
In an interview with NBC on Saturday, Trump said he would likely grant TikTok a 90-day extension to work out a deal with the government and keep the app up and running.
The law itself, which officially takes effect on Jan. 19, doesn’t outright ban TikTok. Rather, it prohibits users from accessing the platform through app stores, like those run by Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL), and cloud services unless parent company ByteDance sells itself to an owner that is not controlled by a country the US considers adversarial.
Congress has accused ByteDance of having close ties to the Chinese government and alleges that the Chinese Communist Party could force the company to provide it with information on US users or otherwise spread propaganda on the platform.
But the outcry from users and TikTok’s backers has forced President Joe Biden and Trump to respond. Even if Trump assures Apple and Google that his administration won’t enforce the law, it’s not guaranteed that it will do so in the future. And each time the companies don’t comply with the law they’d have to pay a fine of $5,000 each time a user accesses the social media app.
Trump will have to either convince Congress to overturn the ban or find some other way to work around it if he wants to keep the service up and running, and neither of those is simple.
The biggest winner could be one of TikTok’s long-term critics, Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In particular, Instagram, owned by Meta, could see a sizable uptick in advertiser dollars if TikTok bites the dust.
