TikTok ban: all the news on the app’s shutdown and return in the US

TikTok says a power outage is causing ongoing issues and outages that started in the US early Sunday morning. In an email to The Verge, TikTok USDS spokesperson Jamie Favazza pointed to a statement posted to the joint venture’s newly-created X account, which says the company has been “working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate.”

On Sunday, many US users, including some of us here at The Verge, reported not being able to upload videos to TikTok or see most new videos, including new videos uploaded successfully by users from outside the US. Others said that their algorithm appeared to “reset,” though it’s unclear if that’s linked to the power outage, too.

TikTok has suffered from extensive problems on its first weekend after completing a transaction that changed the ownership of its US arm. According to Downdetector, the issues initially spiked in the early hours of Sunday morning, but many users, including editors here at The Verge, are still reporting errors.

On Monday morning, TikTok USDS head of communications Jamie Favazza responded to our inquiries, pointing to a post on a newly-created X account for the US joint venture that said its current issues are the result of a data center power outage.

TikTok finally closed a deal meant to bring it into compliance with the law that should have banned it a year ago, and the lawmakers who passed that law still don’t seem to know what’s going on.

The company announced Tuesday that its US service is now part of the separate TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, with parent company ByteDance holding just a 19.9 percent stake in that new entity. The rest is owned by Oracle and investment firms Silver Lake and MGX, as well as smaller investors including Michael Dell’s family investment firm. Oracle will store US data and the joint venture will “retrain, test, and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data.” The new entity will also “have decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and content moderation.”

TikTok is officially under new ownership in the US, and that could spell big changes for the video-sharing app. On January 22nd, ByteDance – TikTok’s Chinese parent company — and a group of investors closed a $14 billion deal to spin off the platform’s US operations, introducing a new slate of American executives.

The Silver Lake investment firm, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and the cloud giant Oracle will each have 15 percent stakes in the new TikTok US Data Security (USDS) Joint Venture LLC. ByteDance will still hold a 19.9 percent stake in the company, in line with the divest-or-ban law that went into effect last year — though the deal was pushed through with help from President Donald Trump in persistent disregard of the law.

Just over a year after it briefly disappeared from app stores, TikTok in the US is now part of a new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. With approval from both the US and China closing on the schedule laid out in December, ByteDance’s ownership of the new joint venture is now only 19.9 percent to satisfy the terms of the divest-or-ban law signed in 2024 by President Biden. The other 80.1 percent is owned by investment firm Silver Lake, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX — the three “managing investors” that now hold 15 percent stakes — and several other smaller investors, like Michael Dell’s family investment firm.

A press release announcing the deal’s closure didn’t say how much those stakes cost or give details about potentially launching a new app in the US. It did say that the joint venture’s oversight of “comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users” will apply to TikTok, the video editor CapCut, Lemon8, and “a portfolio” of other apps and services.

TikTok has finalized a deal to sell enough of its US business satisfy the divest-or-ban law, as initially reported by Axios, The Hollywood Reporter, and CNBC. According to a memo sent from CEO Shou Zi Chew to employees (included in full below) on Thursday, they are targeting a closing date of January 22nd, 2026. Once the deal is done, he writes that ownership stakes in TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC will break down as follows:

After TikTok briefly went dark in the US in January, President Donald Trump granted TikTok a series of extensions to come up with a deal to sell a stake in its US-based operations. The US and China finally agreed on a “framework” for a deal in September, leading to yet another extension that expired on December 16th.

Following months of delays, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that’s supposed to “save” TikTok. Trump claims the deal will make the app “American-operated,” fulfilling the divest-or-ban law that threatened the China-owned app’s presence in the US. But the Trump administration didn’t reveal any information about who will own TikTok’s US operations, or how much they’ll own. And questions remain about whether the new agreement — and the steps taken to get there — is even legal.

“The TikTok saga has been the single clearest articulation, the single most vivid example of the lawlessness of this administration, of its imperial conception of itself as above the rule of law,” Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, tells The Verge. During an interview, Rozenshtein calls into question Trump’s repeated deadline extensions that pushed back the enforcement of the TikTok ban law.

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order recognizing the framework of a deal between ByteDance and the US that would satisfy the TikTok divest-or-ban law. The deal values TikTok’s US operations at $14 billion and puts it under the control of companies based in the US.

“I spoke with President Xi [Jinping], we had a good talk,” Trump said during a briefing. “I told him what we were doing, and he said, ‘Go ahead with it.’”

A 10 percent stake in Intel, 15 percent of Nvidia’s China sales, a “golden share” of Nippon Steel — what price will Trump extract next in exchange for favorable treatment? Well, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump Administration is “expected to collect a multibillion-dollar fee” in exchange for negotiating a US takeover of TikTok’s US business.

That fee will reportedly come from TikTok’s US investors, including private equity firm Silver Lake and Oracle, with the new group getting half of TikTok, while TikTok China’s parent company ByteDance would still have under 20 percent.

China and the US have “made progress” on granting permission for ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American consortium, fulfilling a nine-months-overdue legal requirement. After saying a tentative deal had been reached Monday and that approval would come Friday, President Donald Trump’s administration has issued an update that leaves the current status ambiguous and the details bare-bones.

“I just completed a very productive call with President Xi of China. We made progress on many very important issues including Trade, Fentanyl, the need to bring the War between Russia and Ukraine to an end, and the approval of the TikTok Deal,” Trump posted on Truth Social, noting he and Xi Jinping would meet at the APEC Summit in Korea in October. “The call was a very good one, we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval, and both look forward to meeting at APEC!”

TikTok might not finalize its deal to sell its US operations for at least another month. Sources tell CNBC’s David Faber that the US and China might close on an agreement within the next 30 to 45 days, while Oracle will remain the app’s cloud partner, allowing it to continue routing US user data on American servers.

On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that the US and China have reached a “framework deal” for TikTok. He added that President Donald Trump would confirm the deal on Friday — two days after TikTok’s latest deadline to divest expires. Trump has already given TikTok three extensions to negotiate a deal, and it’s unclear whether he’ll grant TikTok another while the company finalizes an agreement.

The US and China have reached a “framework” deal to divest TikTok from its Chinese parent company, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters during trade talks in Madrid on Monday. As noted by Reuters, Bessent confirmed that “the framework is for a switch to a US-controlled ownership.” He said Trump will confirm the deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday — two days after the latest deadline to sell or ban the app.

The preliminary deal comes after months of rocky negotiations between TikTok and the Trump administration. The app faced a ban in January, but President Donald Trump granted TikTok an extension to work out a deal to sell its operations in the US, as required by the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Trump granted TikTok two more extensions after that, giving it until September 17th to reach an agreement. It’s unknown whether he will formally extend the deadline or consider this announcement sufficient to count as a divestiture; it’s also unclear whether the deal will satisfy the requirements laid out in the law.

While it was President Joe Biden who signed the law that would force ByteDance to sell its stake in TikTok or face a ban, it’s his successor, Donald Trump, who has yet to fulfill his promise of arranging a deal to keep TikTok running, legally, in the United States. The current deadline for a deal is September 17th. Still, it hasn’t stopped Trump’s administration from creating @WhiteHouse on TikTok, which published its first post on Tuesday night: a video celebrating Trump’s accomplishments.

The ban has only seen TikTok shut down in the US for one day, and its impact has been delayed three times. The first time was in January, when Trump took office and signed an executive order delaying enforcement of the ban for 75 days; then there was another delay in April, after a potential deal fell through due to Trump’s harsh tariffs against China, and then in June, when he stated that he believed Chinese President Xi Jinping was open to a deal if a buyer emerged.

Even with the TikTok divest-or-ban law officially in effect since January, the app has only shut down service in the US for one day. Now, The Information reports that an agreement for a sale satisfying the law’s requirements is close and would come with a new, separate version of the app.

Any deal, however, would need approval from the Chinese government, which is also still wrangling with the Trump administration over tariffs.

A Freedom of Information Act request has produced letters that the US Department of Justice sent to Google, Apple, Amazon, and several other companies in order to assuage their concerns about breaking a law that banned US web services from working with TikTok.

The documents — obtained by Zhaocheng Anthony Tan, a Google shareholder who sued for their release earlier this year — show Attorney General Pam Bondi and her predecessor Acting Attorney General James McHenry III promising to release companies from responsibility for violating the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which required US companies to ban TikTok from app stores and other platforms or face hundreds of billions of dollars in fines. The law was intended to force a sale of TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, due to national security concerns.

For the third time, President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for TikTok to spin out from its Chinese parent company or face a US ban. As White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed in a statement Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order on Thursday extending the deadline another 90 days, landing the new deadline in mid-September.

The Trump administration will spend the next 90 days “working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure,” Leavitt said.