Enlarge/ TikTok’s US fate is up in the air, but at least you can still download and patch it.
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The Department of Commerce has put a stay on enforcing an executive order that would have forced popular short-form video app TikTok to suspend all US operations as of midnight tonight. This is a tacit admission that the proposed ban isn’t actually particularly important to the administration any longer.
Commerce said the orders against TikTok are on hold “pending further legal developments” in multiple lawsuits, The Wall Street Journal reports.
President Donald Trump earlier this year signed two executive orders relating to TikTok. The first, on August 7, declared the app to be a national emergency. A second (PDF), issued one week later, gave ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, 90 days to divest the app to a US owner.
That deadline fell today, November 12. And while ByteDance has not divested any portion of TikTok yet, it does have a deal of sorts in place with Oracle that the White House seemed more or less OK with after it was announced in September.
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ByteDance filed an appeal in federal court earlier this week asking for more time to make the Oracle deal happen. In short, ByteDance said, it has followed through on its end of the dealnow, it just needs the US government to remember what’s going on.
“For a year, TikTok has actively engaged with CFIUS in good faith to address its national security concerns, even as we disagree with its assessment,” TikTok said Tuesday in a statement. “In the nearly two months since the president gave his preliminary approval to our proposal to satisfy those concerns, we have offered detailed solutions to finalize that agreementbut have received no substantive feedback on our extensive data privacy and security framework.”
Meanwhile, thanks to all that “pending legal action,” the administration was already prohibited from putting any part of its TikTok bans into effect today.
TikTok filed suit against the government shortly after the executive orders were signed. In September, Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted TikTok’s request for an injunction, ruling that the government had likely overstepped its legal authority by crafting the ban.
A group of content creators who make a living using TikTok also filed suit against the administration, alleging that the ban would basically destroy their livelihoods. In late October, Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the US District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania agreed, ruling that a shutdown would cause the creators “significant and unrecoverable economic loss” and granting an injunction against the ban.