The bill to ban TikTok on all government devices in the US went into effect on January 19th, 2025, at10:30 pm eastern time. However, the act to ban TikTok in the United States was first mentioned by Donald Trump in August 2020 when he first said that he questioned banning TikTok in the United States as he considered it to be a national security threat to the United States.
Following this act, he gave an order to all American companies that they can no longer do business with Byte Dance, the company that owns TikTok, and he gave TikTok 90 days
(about 3 months) to sell the US servers of TikTok. Microsoft, which was in the works of confirming a deal to buy the US side of TikTok. Though, this deal never goes through.
TikTok then sues Donald Trump for this act. When Joe Biden takes office, he completely pauses the act of selling TikTok and stopping the ban. However, in March 2024 things start to heat up for TikTok again.
In March 2024, Congress begins to start thinking of TikTok poses a threat to the United States. Congress then begins to pass a bill stating that TikTok’s US servers must either be sold or the app will be banned in the US. The bill was then passed onto President Joe Biden who signed it.
On January 17th, 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the bill stating that the banning of TikTok in the US servers will happen on January 19th of 2025. When the servers went out Byte dance gave an official statement saying that “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 stayed tuned!”
When the TikTok servers went off in the United States an app named Red Note or Xiaohongshu noticed a significant increase in the number of users they had gained in the past few days. They had gained over 700,000 new users. The app also quickly became the number one most downloaded free app in the United States.
People in the US treated Red Note like an alternative for TikTok when it was banned. Red Note is a Chinese app that works a lot similar to TikTok and Pinterest. You are able to scroll on a page and it works like TikTok. TikTok users began to flood the app calling
themselves TikTok refugees. “I downloaded Red Note because I thought that TikTok was going to be banned for a long time. It was actually a good substitute, and I learned a bit of a new language.” – Chris
TikTok’s servers were not down as long as most thought it would be as on January 20th President Donald Trump signed an executive order to postpone the ban of TikTok for 75 days. After a couple of hours of TikTok being banned in the United States TikTok posted an updated statement on their social media saying that they are reopening servers, and they
thank Donald Trump for providing clarity to their service providers that it is safe to open the servers back up for the United States. The servers for the United States had opened back up for all users in the United States on January 20, 2025, around 3:30 eastern time.
Most are not convinced and speculate that something is happening beyond the scenes. So far, the most updated situation on the fate of TikTok is that President Donald Trump has confirmed that he has spoken to many companies that want ownership of
TikTok. He told reporters that Microsoft is in the works of acquiring ownership of the US side of TikTok. He also stated that he would like to see a bidding war for the app.
