Washington DC, Jan 18 (EFE).- TikTok suspended its operations in the United States on Saturday, a day after the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the video sharing platform to halt a law to ban its operations in the country.
The app, which has 170 million users in the US, sent many of them a message on their phones with the warning: “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now,” attributing the cessation of operations to a legislation passed by the Congress.
A bipartisan law passed by Congress in April 2024 gave ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok’s operations in the US to an investor who was not considered an “adversary” of the country or face ban for national security reasons. The ban was set to come into effect on Jan. 19.
However, according to Joe Biden’s government, TikTok made this decision on its own. Following the Supreme Court ruling, the White House announced that the current administration would not apply the law and its implementation would remain in the hands of the next president, Donald Trump, set to take office on Monday.
“We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!,” the video sharing platform added.
Meanwhile, several users reported that TikTok had been removed from Apple’s app store in the US, so it can no longer be downloaded.
In practice, the law coming into force would require Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, as well as web hosting companies that collaborate with the platform, such as Oracle and Amazon Web Services, to cut relationships with it.
Failure to comply with the rule carries significant economic sanctions as companies that continue to support TikTok could face fines of up to $5,000 per user, which could translate into billions of dollars, given the size of their US user base. EFE
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