TikTok is back up in the US for now, but there's no guarantee it'll stay that way. (ABC NEWS: Evan Young/Reuters)
Americans got a taste of life without TikTok on the weekend, before 176 words from Donald Trump — incidentally, on his own social media platform — ended the outage.
TikTok "went dark" for 170 million US users on Saturday night local time, hours before Chinese parent company ByteDance missed its deadline to sell to an American buyer.
The platform's familiar logo also vanished, albeit briefly, from Google and Apple's app stores, while other internet service providers which keep the app running followed suit, fearing gargantuan fines if they didn't comply.
It wasn't until Trump published a post on Truth Social, that TikTok began to flicker back to life.
This was the message that US TikTok users received once the app went back online. (AP: Erik S Lesser)
But the newly inaugurated president is still a long way from fulfilling his promise to "save" the platform.
TikTok's near-ban experience has plunged the Trump administration, ByteDance, and every company that's keeping it online into uncharted legal waters.
Another TikTok outage isn't off the cards.
In fact, the only certainty now for the platform and its users is more upheaval.
TikTok's astronomical gamble on Trump
ByteDance and its service providers have taken a gamble in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars by switching the platform back on.
The company is betting that Trump can protect them from fines that would otherwise result from effectively ignoring a US law, which it's currently in breach of.
A bipartisan bill passed in April 2024 says ByteDance must sell its US operations to a US-based company by January 19 or face a ban.
Failure to adhere to that ban, either on the part of ByteDance or any of its service providers, comes with a fine of US$5,000 ($8,047) per user, per day.
ByteDance has so far been steadfast in its refusal to sell, but as the deadline loomed, pressure mounted on the US government to intervene.
Donald Trump has given TikTok a reprieve in the US but the platform is still a long way from permanent salvation. (ABC NEWS: Evan Young/Reuters)
In the days before the ban, both the previous Biden administration and the new Trump team signalled they wouldn't pursue fines.
But it was Trump's post that seemed to make the difference, prompting speculation that the timing was political.
"The going consensus online is that TikTok wanted to embarrass President Biden and provide incoming President Trump with an opportunity to be a hero," says Phillip Mai, a social media researcher at Toronto Metropolitan University.
But with catastrophic fines hanging in the balance, the decision was more than just political.
"They just got the certainty that they were looking for from the Trump camp," says Tom Barrett, research associate in emerging technology at the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney.
Legal scholars warn there are still no guarantees, but it seems the gamble, though potentially ruinous, is a calculated one.
"[Fines] are possible but not likely," Mr Lai says.
"The president after Trump could choose to go after the violators.
"But it is not likely that a future president would want to look backward or be responsible for the bankruptcy of so many US tech companies.
"By ignoring the law and helping TikTok to come back online, all of TikTok's service providers are daring a future US government to fine them hundreds of billions of dollars.
"This sets a very bad precedent and is a signal that tech firms have now joined banks as institutions that are apparently too big to fail."
How legally shaky is TikTok's apparent salvation?
Experts say none of the assurances given by Trump so far are legally binding.
The president promised to issue an executive order on the day of his inauguration, to extend the deadline for a sale, "so that we can make a deal to protect our national security".
But questions remain about how legally effective that would be, as the current law has already been given the Constitutional green light by the Supreme Court, and can only be repealed by an act of Congress.
"It depends on what the executive order says," says Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond in Virginia.
"How carefully it's drafted, how much the president attempts to work with Congress and choose a solution that doesn't run afoul of the legislation… it's pretty delicate."
Trump to decide fate of TikTok in US after court upholds ban
Photo shows 2025-01-16T051121Z_752962051_RC2DACA44CP9_RTRMADP_3_USA-CHINA-TIKTOK-TRUMP (5)
Another option is for Trump to instruct the Justice Department to ignore the statute, risking a legal crisis.
Such moves may prompt challenges in court, according to Carl Tobias, but the real crisis arrives in 90 days, if ByteDance refuses to sell enough of its US business to satisfy the law.
He believes a more likely course of action for Trump is to woo Congress.
"It would be best if Congress then passed the legislation that blessed [Donald Trump's plan], rather than go it alone in the executive branch," Professor Tobias says.
"With Republicans in charge in both houses and being very supportive of Trump … they're likely to be relatively flexible, even though they might have strongly supported the legislation.
"It's conceivable that something could work out, but it's not a slam dunk."
Could TikTok go dark again?
The short answer is that TikTok will likely remain available to those in the US in its current form for at least the next three months.
But there's still no guarantee the platform won't go dark again.
"In the short term, that's not likely to happen, but it is conceivable it could if things unravel, or if a deal can't be assembled, and it's important not to underestimate how difficult that may be," Professor Tobias says.
For now, there are no promising deals in the works, at least not publicly.
In his post on Truth Social, Trump proposed a 50-50 ownership model between ByteDance and an American company, but Mr Lai warns that won't be enough.
"If it's not a 100 per cent divestiture, TikTok is still not in compliance with the law," he says.
There’s no guarantee that TikTok won’t go dark again. (AP: Richard Vogel)
Even if ByteDance does sell, which it's so far shown no signs of doing, and a buyer can be found, there are other "potential barriers," Mr Barrett says.
Chief among them is China's export restrictions on the sale of algorithms such as TikTok's.
TikTok's algorithm is widely acknowledged to be uncannily sophisticated, and if it is left out of any sale, American users might notice that the platform changes dramatically, and not in a way they'll necessarily enjoy.
"[TikTok] will stay up for at least three months, but anything beyond that is between [the Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] and Trump," Mr Mai says.
"The task for Trump and his team… is to find a carrot and a stick big enough to convince China to allow TikTok to sell their golden goose.
"If not, the site could go down again."
ByteDance has so far been steadfast in its refusal to sell its US TikTok operations. (Reuters: Dado Ruvic)
Trump's hero moment on Sunday is a fragile one.
Laws and Supreme Court decisions aside, Mr Barrett points out the American public's views have changed since the TikTok bill was first dreamed of.
"Pew polling suggests support for the ban has dropped from about 50 per cent … to 32 per cent in July, August of last year," he says.
If TikTok does go dark again, its users, who comprise roughly half of all Americans, might be slow to forgive the president who promised to "save" it.
Additional reporting by the Specialist Reporting Team's Evan Young
