Why is TikTok back after being banned for one day?

The Supreme Court ruling came on Friday morning in the US.

This upheld the law, passed by Congress, banning the app due to the risk of Americans’ data being passed on to the Chinese government – something TikTok is adamant does not happen.

The law was due to kick in on Sunday, but on Saturday night, the app went dark.

Users in the US who tried to use it were met with a note reading: “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

But it added the company hoped to work with Trump “to reinstate TikTok.

Then, on Sunday – the day the ban was meant to start – the app was back up and running with a message: “Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the US!

However, that was only for people who already had the app – it was still unavailable to download on app stores in the US.

Posting on Truth Social, a social media platform he owns, Trump said on Sunday: “I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark! I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

An executive order is an instruction from the president which has the weight of the law behind it.

His order, he said, would give the company time to find a US partner to buy half of the company.

I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to stay up,” he said.

The Biden administration made clear they would not enforce the law – so another option would be for Trump to follow suit and allow the law to stand but tell the Department of Justice (DoJ) to ignore it.

The government would be effectively telling Apple and Google they will not be punished for continuing to allow people to download TikTok onto their devices, meaning the law would remain in place but would essentially be redundant.

Obviously, the firms might be uncomfortable about breaking the law even if they have been told doing so is fine – as it would be effectively requiring them to take the president’s word for it that they will not face punishment.

Prof Milton L Mueller of the Georgia Institute of Technology – who filed a legal brief in support of TikTok – said the complexity of the issue means even the experts are unclear about what happens next.

Up until now, ByteDance has been resolute that no sale of its prize asset in the US is on the table.

But could that change now that it has actually been banned?

Potential buyers continue to line up – with Bloomberg News reporting on Tuesday that the firm was looking at a sale to billionaire Elon Musk, though TikTok described this as “pure fiction”.

Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire businessman Frank McCourt are among those who have previously expressed an interest in buying it.

Mr McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, said he had secured $20bn in verbal commitments from a consortium of investors to bid for TikTok.

There is an even more left field – and considerably less serious – proposed owner.

The biggest YouTuber in the world Jimmy Donaldson – AKA MrBeast – has claimed he is now in the running to make a deal after he had billionaires reaching out to him about it.

Though it may seem like a joke, he has a significant financial incentive to try and save the app – MrBeast has more than 100 million followers on TikTok.

TikTok was the only ByteDance app which became available again after the ban – though only for people who already had the app.

It’s still unavailable to download from Apple and Google’s app stores.

As of Monday morning, other apps owned by the company are still unavailable to use in the US, The Verge reports.

These include Lemon8, another social media app which has been compared to Pinterest, and CapCut, a video editing app.

Meanwhile Marvel Snap, a digital card game published by a ByteDance subsidiary, also went down – which caught even its US-based developer Second Dinner off guard.

The company posted on X on Sunday that the outage was a “surprise”, and later said it “hoped to have it back online within 24 hours”.

TikTok says it has 170 million users in the US who, on average, spent 51 minutes per day on the app in 2024.

While its future is still a little uncertain, rivals such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts may benefit.

Users bring advertisers – so this could be a big financial boost to those platforms.

Chief marketing officers who we’ve spoken with confirmed that they will divert their media dollars to Meta and Google if they can no longer advertise on TikTok – this is the same behaviour we saw in India when they banned TikTok in 2020″, said Forrester principal analyst Kelsey Chickering.

Other potential winners include Twitch, which made its name on hosting livestreams – a popular feature on TikTok. Twitch is well known particularly to gamers, though it continues to grow with other content.

Other Chinese-owned platforms, such as Xiaohongshu – known as RedNote among its US users – have seen rapid growth in the US and the UK.

Still, some suggest no existing app can truly replace TikTok, in particular its feature TikTok Shop, which lets users purchase products directly from videos, and makes a lot of money for US creators.

Craig Atkinson, CEO of digital marketing agency Code3, said there was no direct competitor that people could easily switch to – and notes his agency was signing new contracts with clients to build TikTok Shop campaigns as late as December.