Millions of Americans will have tried to follow their routine this morning: turn off the alarm, grab the phone, start to scroll. For TikTok users, there will have been a moment of false hope: the shortest clip of a video starts to play, before the notification pops up that everyone was expecting , but no one was certain would actually appear: ‘Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.’
With a federal ban looming, the company decided to cut off operations for its 170 million users in America, making clear in the statement who is responsible: ‘A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok right now’. This comes after the Supreme Court unanimously upheld last year’s law – implemented on national security grounds – that the app’s China-owned parent company ByteDance would need to divest in order for Americans to keep pouring their data into the app.
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